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Gay Cosmos

Sexuality and Anthropology

In Euro-American scholarship, the history of a discipline's treatment of homosexuality is often more revealing than the information about homosexuality itself. In the study of literature, elaborate efforts have been made to suppress or to interpret away homosexual works. In many cases, the story of the suppression is more interesting than the rather tame work that was being suppressed. A major part of gay history is the history of the suppression of gay history. And so it is with cultural anthropology.

The anthropological record is rife with clear cases of suppression of information concerning the homosexuality of various cultures. We know of these cases because someone has spilled the beans. But we cannot know how often the suppression of information has succeeded and remains undetected.

Given that human biology is adapted to homosexuality, that evolutionary development of the capacity for homosexuality and its survival suggests homosexuality is an adaptive trait in human beings, and that homosexual behaviors are within the normal range of human sexual behavior, any unbiased observer might suppose that homosexuality is widely distributed in human cultures, if it is not universal, and that many societies would have accommodated homosexual behaviors and relationships in more or less positive and creative ways. Indeed, that supposition is correct.

Most human cultures of which we have knowledge accept or approve of homosexuality, at least for some people at some times---a result that ought to surprise no one. Yet uncovering this entirely predictable result has been difficult because throughout most of its existence Euro-American anthropology has expended great efforts in suppressing, denying, and explaining away the evidence of human homosexuality and the evidence of the acceptance of homosexuality in other cultures.

As a fish may be the last to discover water, people have difficulty within their own culture distinguishing those aspects of culture which are universal and essentially human from those aspects which are local, transient, and dispensable. Most of us have been reared in a culture that surrounds us with homophobia as much as fish is surrounded by water. We cannot help but internalize some of that homophobia. We are, of course, aware of the most blatant or violent homophobic acts and propaganda. But to a large extent we are unable to recognize as homophobic many of the attitudes, assumptions, and traditional beliefs that have shaped our society and our selves.

We are adapted for survival in the existing homophobic culture, and therefore we would be ill-prepared to enjoy a society without homophobia were we suddenly transported to it. Old Testament myth contains a deep truth: there is a real reason that a Moses could not himself reach a promised land. For example, although in comparison to that of other minorities in this society gay identity and gay solidarity is relatively weak and poorly developed, many of us have claimed and come to value our identities as gay people. But because we have done so, we will necessarily have difficulty in understand some nonhomophobic cultures in which gay people do not exist. Naturally people with homosexual preferences and practices exist in such societies. But because their culture is blind to distinctions between a homosexual person and any other member of society no category of gay persons exists. In a perfectly nonhomophobic culture, a category composed of all the homosexually active persons would be as artificial, arbitrary, and meaningless as a group composed of every third person to enter a meeting hall.

Homophobia makes sexual preference significant. Without homophobia we would not necessarily recognize ourselves. Many aspects of gay subculture that we value and that we need while we are surrounded by a homophobic society would be impossible or useless in a nonhomophobic society.

Many of our beliefs about what a gay person is are based on homophobic assumptions and on our experiences in a homophobic culture. For instance, we sometimes think that a gay person is more likely to be creative and artistic. A large number of examples suggest there is some truth in this thought. But so far as it is true that gay people tend to be more artistic and creative, it is true only because we exist in a homophobic culture. The reputation of gay people rests upon two factors that are a direct result of our living in a homophobic culture.

One factor is that homophobia creates in a gay people a sense of alienation. Although this sense of alienation is ill-defined and poorly understood, something like it has been observed in the lives or works of many great artists. Sometimes it appears connected with belonging to a minority, other times other feelings of social rejection appear to be at the root.

Another factor is the well-known phenomenon of marginal adaptation. When a minority group faces discrimination in an economic system, it seeks to position itself in jobs and enterprises that few members of the dominate group want to be involved with. Marginal adaptation is why Chinese in the American West are associated with the laundry business, why Jews in Europe, Indians in East Africa, and Chinese in the Far East are known as merchants and money lenders, and it is why gay men in America came to be associated with hairdressing, floral design, interior decorating, and the fine arts.

In a hypothetical nonhomophobic culture we should not expect to find these particular associations of talents and sexuality. In less ideal, that is in real cultures, homosexuality may be associated with other adaptations. Constant dangers in interpreting cross-cultural data are overemphasizing things which seem familiar to us and the tendency to suppose things that are similar to things we know are in fact identical. For example, some traditions of cross-dressing that are found in other cultures really are practically identical to drag as we know it, but many more traditions are different in significant ways.

Cultural anthropology is a European creation that has never managed to rid itself of European racism and homophobia. Although anthropologists are for the most part honest, well-educated people who seek the truth as well as they know how, many hurtful falsehoods have arisen from their work because of their European biases. If anything, this may be taken as further evidence of how difficult it is even for an intelligent person of goodwill, trained in making cultural observations, to eradicate from his perceptions the common, unquestioned, and often wrong attitudes of his own culture. It is little wonder that laymen make the same sorts of errors. Of course there are also plenty of examples of anthropologists who have been too craven to seek or to publish the truth or who have been consciously deceitful.

As it has happened, there is a history of interactions between the racist biases of European anthropology and its homophobic ones, so that it is impossible to discuss the history of the homophobic biases without the context of the racist ones. Anthropology began with the racist assumption of European superiority. Anthropologists did not, in the main, decide to accept that assumption. Rather, they were incapable of realizing that they had made it. An early theory of European anthropology was that societies and their cultures evolve, much as biological systems evolve, from simple, primitive systems to complex, sophisticated ones. That much of the theory is probably not so far from the truth. Europeans, not surprisingly, thought that European nations represented the most highly evolved form of civilization. They also thought that some other contemporary cultures were "savage" and others were "primitive," which is to say, unevolved and essentially the same as the earliest prehistoric cultures.

This is the same mistake that is made by those who think the theory of evolution means that human beings evolved from present-day apes, when the theory actually holds that human beings and modern apes are both evolved from a common ancestor. No presently existing society is primitive in the sense of being unevolved. Societies have adapted and evolved differently according to their differing circumstances.

For example, tropical people tend to wear few clothes. European anthropologists interpreted this as evidence that tropical cultures were only slightly evolved from the animal state in which nakedness is the rule. Europeans thought tropical people lacked the intelligence to make clothing. That tropical women went about with their breasts exposed was taken to indicate an animallike sexuality prevailed among tropical people. Tropical customs such as scarring and tattooing were portrayed as brutish.

But of course it was only a matter of climate. Tropical people knew very well how to make clothes. They wore loincloths that were often elaborately woven and they certainly could have applied the same techniques to make more encumbering apparel if they had wanted it. That they did not want it is only evidence that they had reached a sensible accommodation with the tropical environment in which they lived. While European men, who as adults seldom saw a bare female breast except in sexual situations, regarded the bare breasts of tropical women as a sign of wanton depravity, tropical concepts of modesty and concepts of the erotic were adapted to tropical circumstances. The native men did not respond to the sight of a bare breast in the way the Europeans did. Scars and tattoos were merely a differently evolved form of the almost universal human desire for adornment which among European people found expression in various articles of their multi-layered attire.

Wherever Europeans looked they perceived evidence of their own cultural superiority. They were able to maintain such views only because they had more or less perfected firearms, which were only real basis of European superiority. At first European racism was the hard-line kind. Non-European people were regarded as little better than animals. Not only was it morally unobjectionable, but also positively desirable that Europeans enslave, loot, and displace other societies.

We find many reports of native homosexuality from this period. Most of these reports, however, are parts of general catalogues of depraved behavior, a typical example being a sketchy description of a homosexual orgy among the "young bucks" that followed a cannibalistic feast. Such reports are exceeding difficult to interpret.

In all the world, we now know, cannibalism is exceedingly rare and probably never has been regarded as an acceptable food source, but is almost always associated with solemn ritual. It is doubtful that anything that could be described as a cannibalistic feast ever existed. We know homosexuality is common, but public orgies whether homosexual or not are rather rare. It is hard to know whether any part of such a report is true.

We do know that a number of travelers' reports which have been admitted as anthropological evidence are utter fabrications. Besides being likely to interpret local behaviors in the worst possible light, missionaries found it beneficial to fund-raising efforts to depict the natives as greatly in need of European moral guidance, but a number of dubious missionaries' reports have been assimilated into the anthropological record uncritically. A popular kind of fiction was the roman africaine which was presented as a journal of the narrator's travels in exotic places. The authors of these novels seldom attempted to do any research at all, but made up their accounts out of whole cloth. Some of these novels were not clearly presented as fiction and were accepted as fact by the public. Occasionally anecdotes from the novels passed into scholarly literature. Many factors have to be considered before reports from this period are accepted at face value.

At any rate, there was in the early period no reason European anthropologists should not report homosexuality if they observed it or even if they merely suspected it. The homophobic bias was in-step with the racist bias: homosexual behaviors were considered depravity and non-Europeans were believed to be depraved.

In the mid-Nineteenth century European attitudes began to change. Slaving and looting were no longer seen as advantageous to Europe; what an increasingly industrialized Europe needed were markets and raw materials. This would require a degree of stability and order in the subject societies. British colonial policy adopted the strategy of indirect rule to introduce the desired stability and order. The theory of indirect rule is to leave native institutions intact so far as possible and to rule through the mechanisms of the native government. This requires considerable intelligence concerning the structure of the native society; it would undermine the whole policy if the wrong people were dealt with, for example if a minor ceremonial functionary were mistaken for the paramount political leader.

Anthropologists seemed the perfect tools for acquiring the required intelligence. Anthropology was encouraged, and soon better trained and better funded European anthropologists were to be found almost everywhere, sticking their noses into other people's business.

At about the same time, European racism began to change its line. In no way was the underlying assumption of European superiority questioned. But the implications of that assumption began to take a liberal, paternalistic turn. The catch phrases of the day were "white man's burden" and "noble savage." With the rise of transcendentalism, nature was getting a good press. All things natural were exalted, and it followed that the supposed animallike characteristics of non-Europeans would come off better in the new ideology. The so-called savages were now seen as noble, as children of nature, simple, uncomplicated, and innocent in the way that animals are innocent. The role of the white man---the white man's burden---then should be to protect native people in their natural habitat, as if managing a wildlife preserve, and to slowly and carefully instruct native peoples in the moral and social good that Europeans had evolved. On the other hand, it was recognized that European cultures had in some degree degenerated, and it was hoped that noble savages could be spared from contamination by degenerate elements. Supposedly the plan was to free the native peoples, eventually, from European domination, but it was thought this would take very many generations owing to the supposedly limited learning capacity of the natives and their less-evolved social institutions.

In this period information about homosexuality in native cultures is suppressed, distorted, or accompanied by excuses. The racist assumptions of cultural anthropology were on a collision course with its homophobia. The (liberal) racist theory was that native peoples were natural. The homophobic theory was that homosexuality was unnatural. Therefore, there could not be any native homosexuality. Evidence of homosexuality among native peoples could not be allowed to exist. And when it was uncovered, something had to be done about it.

People who came of age in the late 1960s may believe that social progress usually occurs across a broad front. They may wonder then why the slight progress from hard-line racism to liberal racism that occurred in the Nineteenth Century was not accompanied by similar progress against homophobia. But historically, progress is more usually accomplished one issue at a time. For example, the American abolitionist movement found it necessary to deny that it entertained any notions of emancipating women along with the slaves, and later the women's suffrage movement returned the favor by repeated denials that giving women the vote was in any way connected with enfranchising blacks in the American South.

The task then of Euro-American cultural anthropology was to prevent evidence of native homosexuality from coming to light. In this formidable undertaking anthropology was not always successful.

One way the suppression of information proceeded was simply by failing to observe the evidence and by refusing to ask the right questions of the right people. Since, in theory, no native homosexuality existed, there was no point in asking about. Many long and elaborate ethnographies, some with extensive discussions of odd heterosexual customs, do not reveal that the investigator made any inquiry about homosexuality at all. In some of these cases subsequent investigators have discovered rather rich homosexual traditions.

A number of reports from the liberally racist period simply deny native homosexuality, as if this were a wholly unremarkable finding, without giving any account of what attempts were made to discover homosexual practice. Again, subsequent investigators have often had little difficulty in learning of homosexual practices in cultures for which denials had been found in previous literature.

Unfortunately, for some societies there is only one report on the record, and that report denies homosexual practices exist or simply ignores the subject. When the report includes a denial sometimes the form of the denial is revealing. A common kind of denial is goes something like: "There is no homosexuality. All adults are (heterosexually) married." Of course, such a denial does not prove the existence of homosexual practice, but it does show the investigator did not know what questions to ask and would not have recognized evidence of homosexuality if he had seen it.

In traditional---that is, nonindustrial---cultures, marriage is not based on heterosexual romance. Little or no contradiction exists between being avidly homosexual and assuming the roles of parent and spouse. Usually homosexual men are heterosexually married, and this was the rule even in European cultures before the mid-Twentieth century.

Another revealing kind of denial is: "A hermit is known to dress in women's clothing, but it is believed he does not have sexual relations with anyone, male or female." The reporter reveals he would not recognize a homosexual man who was not in drag.

In some cases, the anthropologist must have the facts both ways in order to maintain the twin ideologies of racism and homophobia. Having cited the universality of heterosexual marriage to disprove the existence of homosexuality, what do anthropologists do when they uncover same-sex marriage? They explain that marriage is not, in traditional cultures, a romantic institution. In other words, male-female marriage is taken as proof of exclusive heterosexuality, but female-female marriage is dismissed as a sort of legal fiction. In a way we are fortunate to have such contradictions on the record. They point out the fact of attempted suppression, and they provide some of the tools necessary for the analysis of anthropological data.

Short of outright suppression, explanation and excuse are used to discount evidence of homosexuality.

One kind of report is that the king and princes and the elite of the capital do engage in homosexual relations, but that rural people deny the practice exists in the countryside and deny that homosexuality is a traditional part of the culture. The foolishness of this excuse is evident to any American gay person who grew up in a rural area and who has since moved to an urban area.

Another excuse is that young men resort to homosexuality because the king, princes, and elite have monopolized all the young women in harems. Evidently the elites of traditional societies are superstuds, being both notorious homosexual degenerates and incorrigible womanizers. In fact, although perhaps no young men anywhere suppose that they have enough sexual opportunity, lack of heterosexual opportunity can seldom be substantiated where traditions of homosexuality are apparent. The facts of life---and death---in many traditional cultures result in a surplus of women and a large part of the great harems are composed of women who would not be otherwise marriageable or romanceable.

Large harems are not the rule in polygynous societies and probably have little practical effect on the sexual opportunities of young heterosexual males. Most polygynists have only two, three, or four wives and do not have elaborately secured compounds with eunuch guards et cetera. To suppose that young men find no heterosexual opportunities in such situations is to do an injustice to heterosexual ingenuity. Moreover, almost all men do marry when they reach the socially approved age.

Male homosexuality has often been excused as a corruption learned by contact with degenerate cultures. This kind of excuse rests on some racist assumptions: that the natives were too dumb to have figured out homosexuality themselves, that native cultures existed in primitive isolation until relatively recent times, and that native cultures will readily adopt the practices of supposedly more advanced societies uncritically.

For example, the occurrence of male prostitutes in a capital city is taken as evidence that the native culture has been corrupted by contact with foreign visitors. Female prostitution on the other hand is often depicted as the unfortunate but inevitable effect of the urbanization of the native culture. No outside force is invoked to explain the demand for female prostitutes, but the demand for male prostitutes is always ascribed to foreign influence.

Another excuse is that homosexual activities are the more or less accidental result of youthful high spirits and young people's sex games that have got out of hand. When such situations result in heterosexual activities, the young people are supposed to be practicing to be adults---they are playing house. When the activities are homosexual, the young people are supposed to be confused, misinformed, or unaware of what they are doing.

In many cases, the excuses anthropology introduces to explain away observations of homosexual behavior are similar to the excuses we have all heard before: the participants were drunk, they were really thinking of and wishing for partners of the opposite sex, they only did it for the money, et cetera. Even where homosexuality is admitted, its incidence is underestimated. If a warrior marries a transvestite, the transvestite is recognized as a homosexual but the warrior is not. Sometimes, of course, the excuses offered for homosexual behavior are those the observed culture itself offers. But that is no reason for anthropologists to accept such excuses uncritically, to elaborate upon them, and to add others made of whole cloth.

Although it is yet premature to announce the demise of racism in anthropology, eventually the age of overt colonialism did come to an end and at about the same time Euro-American anthropology began to become rather introspective. Anthropologists and sociologists began to investigate the subcultures of American and European cities and towns. The expense and trouble of a foreign expeditions could hardly be justified when investigators were just as ignorant of cultures that existed but a few blocks away.

The gay subculture was one of the nearby but exotic societies that fell under scrutiny. Most of the early investigators were fairly sympathetic observers, and most of them were women. Male investigators did not dare undertake studies of the gay subculture because of the suspicions this would arouse concerning the investigators' sexualities. With the exception of the few places women could not go, initial exploration of gay male culture was done by women. There was a convenient role for straight women in gay culture, namely that of fag hag, and in this role female investigators could attend parties and enter gay bars. Only where women absolutely could not go: baths and tearooms (public men's rest rooms), were male investigators the first on record. This left entirely female aspects of the culture, such as lesbian bars, off the record. Supposedly straight female investigators could not report on such institutions, and there was no role analogous to fag hag for male investigators.

Some of these studies were invited by the gay community. Gay leaders felt there was much to be gained by getting objective observations of gay culture on the record. Evidently the practice of anthropology and sociology at gay bars became common enough that some curious young men would use the role of visiting anthropologist as an excuse to visit the bars. At any rate, joking references were made to young collegians who supposedly came to bars with notebooks and who excused their presence on the grounds that they were doing a study, and "He's doing a study," became synonymous with "He's a closet case."

To be taken seriously, however, studies had to employ the language of the time and to pay lip-service to the homophobic assumptions of the various disciplines, so many reports appear in journals or collections whose titles incorporate words like "deviance," "psychopathology," "social problems," and so forth. The reports themselves are sometimes laced with such language and make rather alarming reading for those not used to such terms. While terms like "psychopathology" and "sexual psychopath" are always meant as pejoratives, terms like "normal" and "deviant" are often used in their scientific senses, "normal" meaning little more or less than average, and so on.

Throwbacks remained in the study of society and culture. When it seemed evident that many black families in American urban ghettos lacked an adult male, Moynihan and Glazer found it necessary to support the distant-father-domineering-mother theory of homosexuality by explaining why more young males did not become homosexual. The answer, they supposed was in the dozens, a game of insults in which the participants say unpleasant things about one another's mothers. This was supposed to help the young man break the bond with his mother, for he was supposed to accept these insults while remaining calm ("cool") enough to compose an even more devastation rejoinder. Perhaps there are more egregious examples of writers' employing homophobic arguments to support liberally racist ideas, but there can hardly be any more ridiculous.

In spite of its tortuous history, the record of male homosexuality is relatively intact compared to that of lesbianism. The record of female homosexuality is abysmal. Male homosexuality has been better observed and recorded, and has especially benefitted from inquiries by a number of women who could report their findings frankly when any man doing likewise might expect his career to end.

The concepts of female homosexuality ought to be independently derived, but the record is hardly good enough to support synthetic work. Generally the traditions of female homosexuality can be discussed only by comparison to the better known and better understood traditions of male homosexuality.

Male ethnographers, for reasons of their own culture or those of the subject cultures, got their information on female homosexuality from male informants. Male informants reply as if they know the facts, but of course it is very doubtful that they often did. We can discount the Euro-American male biases in these reports, but we do not know what false beliefs the native men may have harbored. (True or not, what men in a culture believe about female homosexuality is often itself traditional, and a study of these traditions might prove illuminating.)

If our sole objective were to produce as much evidence of female homosexuality as possible, that is not so difficult. If we credit all reports, the picture that emerges is something like this:

"Everywhere in the world, just as soon as the men are out of sight, all the women rush into each other's arms. They always have handy their ingeniously devised dildos. They are virtually insatiable, but also find a spare moment to engage in witchcraft. A woman who acts like a person is certainly a lesbian. She has seduced all of the women in the village and the proof of that is that wives complain although they have perfectly good male husbands."

When reports such as these reach a certain kind of feminist theorist, the reports are accepted as basically true, except that women, it turns out, are never having sex just for fun, but are always intending it as a political statement of global significance. And, of course, women never use dildos.

Women ethnographers have not always done much better than men in reporting traditions of female homosexuality. Any Euro-American woman who distinguishes herself academically is already suspected of being lesbian; it will not pay here to devote much attention to traditions of female homosexuality. Native women may mistrust her; the role of ethnographer is in many ways incompatible with native ideas of a woman's role, and they may think of her as an honorary man. If she adheres to the modesty of European dress, some may even have doubts about her true physical sex. If she employs a male interpreter, all is lost.

It takes nothing away form the accomplishments of women who did fine work in investigating male role inversion and the American gay male subculture to say, as many of them acknowledge, that their work was helped because in both situations there was a ready-made tradition of especially frank relationships between homosexual males and women. Nowhere does there seem to be a symmetrical role for male investigators of female homosexuality.

Thus, since the ethnographer is either male or female or a married, presumably heterosexual, couple, we have many reports that are equally poor in their treatments of female and male homosexuality, be we have few or none that are equally good. Traditions of female homosexuality that are likely to be well-reported are those which are symmetrical with the male traditions. Time and again we find: "The women are said to have a similar tradition among themselves," or words to the same effect. Therefore it is impossible to say whether there is in general a symmetry between male and female homosexual traditions or whether we simply have made too much of those traditions which most seem symmetrical.

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