Same Sex, Different Cultures

Exploring Gay And Lesbian Lives

Gilbert H Herdt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813331645
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977091
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Because homoerotic relations can be found in so many cultures, Gilbert Herdt argues that we should think of these relations as part of the human condition. This new cross-cultural study of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals around the world, Same Sex, Different Cultures provides a unique perspective on maturing and living within societies, both historical and contemporary, that not only acknowledge but also incorporate same-gender desires and relations.Examining what it means to organize ?sex? in a society that lacks a category for ?sex,? or to love someone of the same gender when society does not have a ?homosexual? or ?gay/lesbian? role, Herdt provides provocative new insights in our understanding of gay and lesbians lives. Accurate in both its scientific conceptions and wealth of cultural and historical material, examples range from the ancient Greeks and feudal China and Japan to the developing countries of Africa, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Thailand, from a New Guinea society to contemporary U.S. culture, including Native Americans. For all of these peoples, homoerotic relations emerge as part of culture?and not separate from history or society.In many of these groups, loving or engaging in sexual relations is found to be the very basis of the local cultural theory of ?human nature? and the mythological basis for the cosmos and the creation of society. The mistake of modern Western culture, Gilbert contends, is to continue the legalization of prejudice against lesbians and gays.In this light, the book addresses the issue of ?universal? versus particular practices and reveals positive role models that embrace all aspects of human sexuality. Finally, it offers knowledge of the existence of persons who have loved and have been intimate sexually and romantically with the same gender in other lands through divergent cultural practices and social roles.The most important lesson to learn from this cross-cultural and historical study of homosexuality is that there is room for many at the table of humankind.

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Introduction: Gays and Lesbians Across Cultures

BEING DIFFERENT OR STANDING OUT from the crowd has never been easy, whether in New Guinea, Holland, the United States, or anywhere else. In all societies there are laws and rules to obey, and their violation may be punished—even by death—when the majority feels that the social order is sufficiently threatened. Sexuality is always a part of this order, and it is subject to many social controls, being close to marriage and reproduction and often regarded by religion as a sacred core of morality. Incest, for example, is nearly everywhere a prohibition against sex between certain close relatives. We are not surprised by this taboo and indeed so often take for granted cultural restrictions on behavior that these become a given part of our own folk view of “human nature.” We learn to accommodate ourselves to these laws and rules as if they were perfectly normal and natural, when in fact such notions are regarded as foreign in neighboring communities.

For these reasons sexuality is often closely tied to societal definitions of a “man” or a “woman,” to rules of social order and hierarchy, and to beliefs about what is “natural and normal.” In each of these areas those who threaten or disrupt the social order are typically regarded as subversive in the usual sense of political revolutionaries or religious heretics whose actions or existence challenges the status quo. It is no wonder that sexual reform and liberation movements in many lands are thought to be the work of a nation’s enemies. But most people living within the folds of a tradition do not think of themselves in such terms, for they are neither revolutionaries nor heretics, often asking little more than to earn a living, to have friends and family, and to live out the expectations of the surrounding culture.

But what happens when ordinary citizens have divergent or forbidden desires for romance and sexual intimacy with others of their own gender? Here we find a fundamental dilemma—that their very existence as sexual and gendered persons goes directly against the grain of the culture. For millions of people around the world, this crisis of sexual being—of having bodies and desires at odds with the heteronormal roles and folk theory of human nature in their society—is not simply a theory. It produces turmoil and fear in their daily lives and the insistent need to conform and pretend or hide their sexual being. Indeed, it is this individual-against-society dilemma that dominates the history of homosexuality in the western tradition and is common to the problems of understanding gays and lesbians across cultures. The name of this fear is “homophobia.” For the past three hundred years, its hostile attitude has confronted all boys and girls, men and women, who have loved the same gender—and dared to risk the sanctions of society in expressing the crisis of their sexual desires. That is the story of this book.

A great American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, herself a woman who loved women, was fond of telling a creation story that comes from the Digger Indians of California and offers an insight into the cultural plight of lesbians and gays. According to the Indians, “In the beginning God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.” (The metaphor depicts how each culture is made distinctive and unique to its people.) In the old days, Benedict’s informant said, the Indians had far more power than now. “Our cup is broken now. It has passed away” (Benedict 1934, 22). Benedict offered the myth as an affirmation of the broad spectrum of cultural lifeways that anthropologists have found and witnessed in passing from around the world. The myth speaks to a broader ideal of cultural diversity that is essential to belief in the western liberal democracy traditions in which anthropology is itself grounded.

In another way, however, the Digger Indians’ myth also conveys the loss of tradition or custom—and the devastation that occurs when a culture is broken and its people are scattered. “Our cup is broken”: The metaphor imagines a world in which the grace and beauty, the history and identity, of a people are lost and they are deprived of cherished stories of a lifeway. Since it is culture that provides much of the richness and meaning in human life, to be deprived of the support of one’s cultural heritage is tantamount to social death and banishment from all that is worth holding in life. Such a poignant image of the broken cup speaks today to the historical and political suppression of homosexuality in many lands, as much as to the strong idealism and utopian strivings of gays and lesbians who have formed social movements for positive change over the past century. The image also symbolizes a kind of fabled diaspora and a present search for a home—a positive and loving culture—that will accept and cherish lesbians and gays as people who desire and love the same gender as a part of their perceived human nature.

Cultural Concepts of Homosexuality

Anthropology has shown that people who erotically desire the same gender sufficiently to organize their social lives around this desire come in all genders, colors, political and religious creeds, and nationalities. There is no special kind of person who is homosexual; and much as we might expect, there is no single word or construct, including the western idea of “homosexuality,” that represents them all. To make matters even more complicated, the local term in each culture or community that classifies the homoerotic act or role is not always positive; indeed, in the western tradition it is usually negative. And people typically shun what is negative. We should be aware, however, that, even though there is no uniform term for the desire to love and have sexual intimacy with others of the same gender, and even though it may be negative or stigmatizing to be placed in such a category, many persons have dared to brave the consequences: economic loss and social stigma, censure and ostracism, even punishment, imprisonment, or death in the harshest disapproving cultures, such as the Soviet Union and the United States as they were in the Cold War.

Sexual practices “without sexuality” are one of the greatest problems faced by the anthropologist in studying same-gender relations across cultures. How does the anthropologist describe the lifeways of people who engage in homoerotic relations in the absence of the very idea of homosexuality? This is a constant source of intellectual trouble for the outsider who would study a local culture that lacks an equivalent to the western concept. Typically, the western observer assumes that someone who has sex with others of his or her gender is identified as a “homosexual.” But the sky is not always blue; it is more often gray. In a variety of cultures around the world, and even within many communities within the United States, certain individuals of both genders and of distinct ethnic groups engage in homoerotic encounters, but they do not identify themselves as “homosexual” or “gay” or “lesbian” or even “bisexual.” Quite the contrary, they may even be appalled by the idea of homosexuality when it is explained to them, and they cannot think of what being “that way” would feel like even when it is pointed out that they typically have sexual relations with the same gender. They may regard themselves as “heterosexuals,” “straights,” or just “human beings” who on occasion participate in homoerotic encounters for various reasons, including pleasure, money, social expectations, and the absence of other sexual opportunities. It is too easy to say that they have a “false consciousness,” for their understanding is widely shared and even supported by the culture. That they may be afraid or oppressed and unable to self-identify as homosexual or gay are important factors to consider. Given the history of sexual repression in western countries, it is certainly reasonable to remember the stories of people who were “hidden in history” and could not “come out” until recent times (Duberman et al. 1989).

Likewise, in the United States today the cultural classification of sexual and gendered distinctions has created a huge diversity of positive and negative labels. These include “heterosexual,” “homosexual,” “bisexual,” “queer,” “straight,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “dyke,” “faggot,” and “queen.” Notice how often these labels come in pairs: heterosexual/homosexual, gay/straight, and so on. Western culture, it seems, has a penchant for dualisms and binary oppositions, in sexuality and gender as much as in other areas of nature and culture classification (Lévi-Strauss 1964). Although this is just a partial listing, it is striking to see that American culture has produced such a range of homoerotic labels, which also contribute to the valuations and attitudes surrounding sexual identities. We cannot hope to fully understand the meanings of these identities unless we investigate their basis in history and cultural lifeways. This is the reason that cultural relativism—the valuing of a culture in and of itself and not through its moralistic comparison with any other—is of overriding importance in teaching respect for the differences suggested by the beliefs and practices of other cultures as well as of sexual minorities in the western tradition.

The many terms that might be employed to refer to same-gender relations, including the terms bisexual, gay, and lesbian in western cultures, must be understood as situated historical passageways, as spaces in a larger house of uncertain construction and indefinite number of rooms, none of which should be a priori privileged over others. This is why I generally avoid using the term homosexuality—not to be “politically correct” but to be more accurate by employing the neutral descriptor same-gender sexual relations. This term means that people engage in sex with others who have the same genitals as themselves. (In fact, what really matters is what sociologist Harold Garfinkle once called the “cultural genitals,” as these are valued as icons in society; but we get to that in later chapters.) People in many cultures are unwilling to identify themselves with a category term or construct such as homosexuality, and we should respect their right to do so. They may be quiet or shy about expressing what they most desire, particularly when it goes against the grain; and there is good reason to be reticent in openly expressing same-gender desires in repressive societies. More often, in cultures that disapprove of homosexuality, people try to accommodate and blend in, to find what satisfaction they can through compromised relationships of marriage and friendship and extramarital same-gender relations.

In this regard we must remember that in virtually all cultures around the world full personhood is not achievable until people have married and produced children. Otherwise, they go about the business of life trying their best to avoid conflict over these matters, for, after all, even though sexuality is extremely important in human life, there are many other equally important aspects of existence. Or people may come in time to regard themselves as “strange” or “different” or “eccentric” because they enjoy intimacy with others of their own gender. The difference may have to do in large measure with whether they actually carry their desires for love and intimacy over into sexual relations. One of the lessons of the cross-cultural record is that when they do, cultures vary immensely in their response.

The words that we choose in describing these homoerotic feelings and relationships are thus of real importance, both for what they include and what they exclude. In the western historical tradition, as classical scholars have shown, no Greek or Latin word corresponds to the modern concept of homosexuality, and this should give us pause in understanding the matrix of words that surround homosexuality. Although sexual relations among the Greeks occurred between persons of the same gender, and these are widely attested by the ancient sources, there is no notion that they were systematically classified or differentiated from others, nor were they made into a uniform category (Halperin 1990). And even though modern sexuality in western cultures is generally preoccupied with the gender of the sexual partners, in many parts of the world, including ancient Greece and Rome, it was the sexual act that mattered, which was reckoned in terms of the categories “penetrator” and “penetrated.” A man could honorably engage in sexual relations with a woman or with a boy so long as he remained in the socially dominant or senior position of being the penetrator for phallic pleasure. Way into the early modern period desires for both genders were not regarded as very strange for most people (Trumbach 1994). We cannot therefore speak in such general terms of homosexuality in the ancient world or up until the nineteenth century. Neither, in most cases, can we speak of unitary categories of people, such as “the homosexual,” “the heterosexual,” or “the gay/lesbian,” in many societies and historical cultures of the nonwestern world, right up to the present century, for the same reasons.

History reports that people who desired the same gender referred to themselves by a variety of local concepts—molly, queer, fairy, or, in the last century, homosexual, invert—in western countries such as England and the United States (Chauncey 1994; Greenberg 1988; Murray 1996; Trumbach 1994). Outside of the cities, however, and even in neighborhoods of the same urban center, such cultural terms often had secret or privileged meanings that were apparently unknown to large numbers of people—even those who might have aspired to express their same-gender desires through experimentation with these concepts had they known about them. Only in the twentieth century, through mass media and political rhetoric, has the explicit terminology of “homosexuality/heterosexuality” been widely applied to people and acts and events, typically to contain and control all sexual behavior. Only as wide-scale sexual liberation movements gained steam in the 1960s did people who desired the same gender begin to call themselves “lesbian” or “gay.” Since that time these identity systems have been exported to other cultures, which has created controversies in developing countries that previously lacked these concepts, having neither the history nor the political traditions that brought them about. No wonder it seems strange but also familiar to hear of “gays and lesbians” from societies that previously denied having “homosexuality” at all.

One of the great problems of sexual study, particularly of homosexuality, is how many cultures simply lack categories or general concepts that cover the meanings of the contemporary notion of homosexual. We have already seen in the Preface the difficulty that this lack caused me in studying the Sambia. In terms of the ideas and perceptions of many westerners, Sambia men are engaging in homosexual behavior all the time. However, this is not the case from the perspective of the Sambia: They have no idea at all of homoerotic relations between adults, they have an ideal that a man will cease to practice inseminating boys once he becomes a father, and they could not understand the western idea of two men or two women living sexually and socially together throughout their lives. This idea is very alien to the culture; that is why they have no category term homosexuality!

For the Sambia and many other cultural traditions, then, people who engage in same-gender relations are acting in the absence of identity terms that commonly circulate in western culture. They may not have the words or concepts to describe how they feel—either because their culture does not register the desires or because they remain isolated or cut off from the appropriate sources of understanding within their own community. Yet their desires and actions make it clear from the perspectives of today that no matter what they have called themselves or the names they have been called, their desiring and loving the same gender are vital parts of their lives. This is why, in the end, we can brave the difficulties of creating concepts that help us to study and compare these sexual cultures.

We can group the necessary concepts into several areas: sexuality, gender, and gay/lesbian. We might think that defining these terms would be easy for the social scientist who makes a living from studying such matters; but the words sex, love, and romance, among others, have so many meanings, to so many people, under so many circumstances, that they defy easy definition. Or perhaps, as American sociologist John Gagnon (1990) might say, these terms map onto complex, overlapping, and changing “sexual scripts.” As the culture changes, Gagnon would argue, so, too, do the scripts, and this in turn results in change in the very concepts circulated and ultimately analyzed by social scientists. And more recently, change in the culture also means change in the intellectual study of sexuality.

From Gay and Lesbian to Queer Studies

Over the last decade a shift has begun to occur in the ideas and values of scholars and citizens who study and read about sexuality. For more than two decades gay and lesbian studies have thrived in the social sciences and humanities as the political power of gays and lesbians progressed in western countries. Most of the work reported in this book, including my own, comes out of this scholarly and popular writing. But in recent years a new voice has risen to nudge and push the older one in a new direction—a sign not only of political and social change in the ideas at play, but also of the aging of a generation of lesbians and gays and the emergence of a new generation of thinkers concerned with same-gender desires and relationships.

We might characterize this shift as a perspectival difference in “gay theory” or “lesbian theory” versus “queer theory.” These terms are difficult to focus, and they overlap in many areas. We might think of the contrast like this: Where gays and lesbians were marginalized, queers see themselves in the center, but charged with exposing the forms of power that define normality and manipulate people. The concept of “heteronormal” is the most important notion here since it seeks to interrogate and expose the strong tendency in western culture toward heterosexualism—that is, the chauvinistic assumption that “heterosexuality” as a system of social relations and practices, such as marriage, is the one and only normal and natural way to be human. Previously lesbians and gays sought political power and identities that classified them in a marginal category and, in turn, defined their sexual difference, thus providing them with political and social power much in the way ethnic minorities had achieved “cultural status.” Today, however, queers disclaim difference and oppose classifications of all kinds. Where gay and lesbian literature discovered itself by narrating the lived experience of being on the margin or growing up closeted and then coming out, queers shun these attributes in favor of studying and interpreting texts, especially literature and popular culture (Butler 1993; Sedgwick 1990; Lauretis 1993). Queer theory seeks to find the cracks and cleavages between things rather than the things themselves. Where anthropology sought to discover a new culture and history sought to uncover a period of past social life, queer theory seeks the link between these studies. By use of the “deconstruction,” or reinterpretation, of texts, queer theorists worry over linkages among epistemology, theory, literature, philosophy, and popular culture.

In lesbian and gay writing, the person/subject—however marginalized—was regarded as whole and unitary, and the struggle of the scholar was to investigate and regain the wholeness of the experience shattered by the secrecy and marginalization of same-gender desires in the past. Gay writing in the fields of history and anthropology and literature thus sought to recover what had been hidden or erased in stories summing up the gay experience. Queer theory, however, argues that history and culture descriptions are never distinguishable from the authors and assumptions of normality through which subjects or objects are described. There is no interest in “sexual identity” and the “body” as such in queer theory since its advocates regard these not as the stable markers of same-gender desires and lives (the very basis of gay and lesbian studies) but as illusions in language and power relationships. No doubt this all sounds a bit abstract and utopian. Where gay and lesbian studies continue a utopian quest, begun at the end of the nineteenth century, of trying to secure freedom and acceptance of gays as “different” but marginal in society, queers go one step further in refusing all classification and all notions of “normality.”

Sexual Cultures and Sexual Lifeways

Over the decades anthropologists and other scholars, most notably beginning with Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead have articulated several principles about the relationship between culture and sexuality. Four of these concern us here. First, nonwestern societies, past and present, have sexual cultures and codes of sexual practices as complex as our own system of sexuality. Second, sexuality is a part of the social fabric of cus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Gays and Lesbians Across Cultures
• 2 Cultural Myths About Homosexuality
• 3 Same-Gender Relations in Nonwestern Cultures
• 4 Coming of Age and Coming Out Ceremonies Across Cultures
• 5 Sexual Lifeways and Homosexuality in Developing Countries
• 6 Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals in Contemporary Society
• 7 Conclusion: Culture and Empowerment of Sexual Minorities
• Glossary
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index