The Martin Duberman Reader (47 page)

Just as there's no single, proven, causative path to homosexual behavior, so too there's no fixed gay—or for that matter, straight—identity through time and across cultures. There have been huge variations in what constitutes proper (or improper) female and male activities, attitudes, movements, attire, even eating habits. Cultural taboos or mandates have differed radically in human history in regard both to gender and to same-sex relationships.

Yet in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary from
science, history, and anthropology, gays and straights alike remain addicted to the shaky notion of a predetermined sexual orientation and a fixed identity. Which is one reason the younger generation prefers “queer” to “gay”: it's a more inclusive term that potentially embraces a wide variety of “differentness” and is more suggestive of the complex, fluid, contradictory nature of our actual impulses and fantasies (anyone who pays attention to their dreams can readily see that we all have a pronounced, undomesticated, anarchic side).

Why then the general preference for fixed, genetic explanations for human behavior? It simplifies a number of matters, and offers a variety of comforts. If there are predetermined states of being—categorical, airtight, distinctive (and therefore not susceptible to change)—it becomes far easier to accept oneself. “I was born this way, it's my essence, my destiny.” Under the banner of a fixed identity, it's also easier to justify creating a political movement aimed at achieving the rights of those who share that identity.

The genetic explanation for sexual orientation also serves heterosexuals well—thus the huge coverage (front page of the
New York Times
) of LeVay's claim that gay brains were “different” from straight brains and the media's absolute failure to report the inability of other scientists to duplicate LeVay's findings. Most heterosexuals are delighted with the suggestion that homosexuality is inborn. It then becomes a trait confined to a small number of people who are distinctly Other, wholly unrelated to oneself (last night's half-buried dream about sucking the garage mechanic's cock was due to food poisoning).

This may be convenient self-deception, but isn't objectively sustainable in the face of the known evidence. Way back in 1979, in
Homosexuality in Perspective,
Masters and Johnson published their preliminary findings from twenty years of studying sexual fantasies. They concluded that among gay men and lesbians, overt
heterosexual
interaction was their third-highest fantasy; to an only slightly lesser degree, straight men and women fantasized about overt
homosexual
interaction. What made the latter finding especially remarkable was that the heterosexual cohort all ranked zero (“exclusively straight”)
on the famed Kinsey scale and during personal interviews had described same-gender sex as “revolting” and “unthinkable.”

Though Masters and Johnson recoiled from their own findings, it's plausible to argue that the widespread (if deeply repressed) existence among confirmed heterosexuals of same-gender sexual fantasies suggests (as had Freud) that almost everyone is potentially receptive to bisexual contact, that even when we've grown up in a homophobic culture that emphasizes the genetic separation of “straight” and “gay,” the wish to be both retains a strong subterranean hold.

If we can say nothing definitive about the origins of sexual orientation (not to mention those who develop fetishistic attachments to “water sports,” leather, big breasts, small breasts, whipping, or ladies' high-heeled shoes), the same is true about gender nonconformity and its possible link to homosexuality. Recent research findings are complex and controversial—though it's become increasingly clear that we need to emancipate ourselves from a binary view of gender that restricts possibilities in both women and men. Commonplace assumptions (“women are more emotional, men are more aggressive”) are, as with stereotypes about sexual orientation, grounded in a presumed hardwiring that is in fact much contested. Simplistic biological determinism has been undermined recently by the work of many other scholars, especially in anthropology, primatology, and history.

I suspect that if we really do care about breaking down the gender binary, the place to look for inspiration is not Gold's Gym but the increasingly visible transgender movement, offering as it does a radical remodeling of traditional “masculinity” and “femininity.” Gender-discordant behavior hasn't been a front-burner topic since the early 1970s, when radical gay liberationists championed an androgynous ideal. (“Gender-discordant” is a necessary but troublesome term, implying as it does that we know what a gender-concordant model looks like, that it exists cross-culturally and should be viewed in a superior light.)

I myself ascribe to the queer theory argument that “male” and
“female” social roles are not to any significant degree intrinsic—that is, biologically determined—but are primarily, and perhaps even exclusively, the products of learning and repetitive performance. In this context, “gender discordance” becomes something of a
non sequitur
: where all boys are capable of (perhaps even, in the earliest years, inclined toward) a female-identified—which may be comparable to saying transgendered—self-image and presentation, then no particular gender configuration can legitimately be seen as “deviant.”

The currently fashionable incantation—itself harking back to Jungian twaddle about “anima” and “animus”—that men “need to get in touch with their feminine side” doesn't go nearly far enough in meeting the need to reinvent for everyone, male and female, more fluid, expansive self-definitions; it's about moving beyond gender conformity, beyond gender itself, to molding individually satisfying selfhoods.

Currently, gender-discordant boys and girls, taunted at school and berated at home, internalize the view that something is “wrong with them,” that they're “not okay.” And most of them, from an early age, struggle to divest themselves of the disapproved behavior. The psychic cost is high. In repudiating aspects of the self that could he read as “discordant” for traditional gender behavior, these children do deep injury to their affective lives; many, as adults, avoid relationships that might evoke any resurgence of the “wrong” gender traits.

As regards the ongoing debate about whether gay male “promiscuity” is meretricious or praiseworthy, we need to begin by remembering that there is enormous variation in how gay men lead their sexual lives. Even before AIDS, only about 20 percent of the gay male population pursued “sexual adventuring” in any sustained way—about the same percentage as those who chose celibacy. Roughly three-quarters of gay male couples do define “fidelity” in terms of emotional commitment rather than sexual faithfulness—a much higher percentage than is found among either lesbian or heterosexual couples.

Although I've become a less zealous defender of the uncomplicated joys of sexual adventuring than I once was—that doesn't put me in the camp of those who celebrate the transcendent wonders of monogamy, or make claims for its “naturalness” by citing the universality of the practice among other species. The latter simply isn't true, as the latest researchers (see especially Bruce Bagemihl,
Biological Exuberance
) have made abundantly clear. Monogamy exists in the animal kingdom, but is rare—unlike homosexuality, which, as we've also learned recently, is rampant. Far from being universal, monogamy doesn't even exist among birds, those previous exemplars of domesticity and mating. Which is not to say, either, that so-called “open” relationships provide, among humans, any greater measure of happiness (as I also once argued). Apparently the safest guideline here is “different strokes for different folks,” so long as partners to any relationship are honestly committed to its boundaries.

It's difficult, given our puritanical traditions, not to argue against pleasuring the body. That isn't my point. My main concern is that too great a focus on glutes and orgasms often seems yoked to an undernourished political sense and seems, ultimately, a kind of provincialism, an indifference to the survival issues that dominate and defeat most of the planet's inhabitants—including most of its gay people.

Celebrating rather than apologizing for gay male sexuality is a needed antidote to generations of negative stereotyping. But celebration alone can become incantatory, a repetitive chant that ultimately forgets precisely what we're glorifying and why. One gay male writer has defended promiscuity as “diffuse intimacy.” “Diffuse” it certainly is, but does that enhance intimacy or spare us its embrace? We need to be on guard against the temptation to replace the apologetics of the past with an era of too easily bestowed, and perhaps unwarranted, self-congratulation.

—from
Waiting to Land
(2009)

T
he 1980s were probably the first moment in time when an attempt could be made in this country to formalize LGBT studies within a university structure. (That had already happened in the Netherlands as early as 1981, but in no other country.) Thanks to fifteen years of political activism; an AIDS crisis that in the public eye had humanized (as well as demonized) gay people and created more sympathy for them; and the accumulation of a substantial body of work (by, among others, John Boswell, Alan Bray, Blanche Wiesen Cook, John D'Emilio, Lillian Faderman, Jonathan Ned Katz, Joan Nestle, and Leila Rupp), the time was at least potentially ripe.

The ground had become fallow for lesbian and gay studies for reasons that go back even further. Major credit belongs to the advent, following the Stonewall riots, of an organized gay political movement—as always, activism precedes academics. Behind that, in turn, was a whole series of developments in the 1960s: a counterculture that challenged traditional pieties and authorities; a black struggle that contained at its core (“black is beautiful”) the assumption that it was fine—maybe better than fine—to be different; and a feminist movement that boldly confronted the inevitability and “naturalness” of binary gender roles. Had there not been this across-the-board
assault on long-standing norms, the gay movement (and the emergence of gay studies that followed in train) would never have been possible.

After the first dozen years of research into historical material, it became obvious that information regarding whole centuries and several national histories were virtually nonexistent. And what preliminary findings we did have related mostly to the behavior of white men, and a few white women. Efforts to reclaim the gay past, moreover, had thus far primarily focused on two areas of research: biography and the history of repression.

By the end of the 1980s, scholars of the gay past had expanded their search to include how gay people have viewed themselves through time. Here a polarizing debate opened up that in evolving form continues to the present day, and engages many more disciplines than history in the social sciences and humanities. Essentially the debate recapitulates the ancient “nature versus nurture” argument. Gay people themselves overwhelmingly opt—gay men perhaps more than lesbians—for the “nature” explanation (“I was born this way”) and are devoted to the notion that a consistent homosexual presence, personality, and set of behavioral patterns can be perceived through time and across cultures.

But the scholarly world has just as solidly come down on the opposite side of the debate, insistent on the contingent nature of erotic desire and sexual identity. Most gay and lesbian scholars deny that the categories “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are real and persistent aspects of the human psyche that can be identified very far back in time. They argue that such either/or distinctions, rather than being an innate, universal grammar, are not found through time and across cultures, nor are the taboos, judgments, and penalties attached to particular sexual acts.

Historically, same-gender erotic desire has been organized in many different ways—sometimes shaping itself around substantial differences in age or social class between the two partners, sometimes creating “third gender” figures, sometimes insisting that homosexual behavior be understood according to traditional gender
roles (he who penetrates is “male”; he who gets penetrated is “female”). Our sexual behavior, as well as our sexual identity, is, like everything else about our humanness, a product of the particular society in which we live, a reflection of its time-specific norms and values. Queer theorists, moreover, have additionally complicated the picture by modifying the triumphalist emphasis, since Stonewall, on “proud to be gay” to include the melancholic effects that homophobia has had on gay lives: the shame produced by stigmatization has made a significant contribution to certain formative aspects of gay culture.

To become even superficially aware of the range in the past of what were considered ideal, permissible, mandated, or tabooed patterns of same-gender erotic relationships is to become aware of the astonishing diversity of human behavior and of the variety of cultural norms. In Periclean Athens the adult male citizen who did
not
find teenaged young men sexually desirable would himself have been considered aberrant. Among certain tribal cultures in New Guinea, the oral ingestion of semen is considered essential to the youngster's growth into full manhood; on a regular basis, boys fellated men—and “as a result” themselves grew into heterosexual manhood in an apparently unproblematic way.

Adult women in late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century America set up housekeeping together so frequently as to become known as “Boston marriages.” Yet those who lived on into the post–World War I period, when the term “lesbian” became commonly used, vigorously denied that their relationships had had a sexual component. The historical rarity seems to have been what today is regarded as the most commonplace and acceptable arrangement of two adults of the same gender settling down together in a relationship whose intent was monogamous and lifelong.