Wedding Showers and Storms

I went to a party the other day at the house of two new friends.  Recently come to Town, these witty and cheerful women had already made a comfortable home together, complete with soulful-eyed beagle.  Two women and a dog--it looked like a marriage to me.

            Despite such personal arrangements made between lovers, "real" marriage is a legal contract conferred by the state.  The right to marry has emerged as a key demand of many gay and lesbian political activists.  Marriage is also the place where many straight people draw the line.  Real marriage, so they say, requires a man and a woman.  Dogs are optional.  This growing dispute over marriage, many have noted, reflects the noisy rhetoric of "family values" that has dominated much of American politics for the last two decades.  One can draw easy connections between an increasing instability of the American nuclear family and panicky public evocations of family values.  Nowadays, half of married people get themselves unmarried.  This recent collapse of American marriage is nobody's fault in particular.  Rather, it is an effect of the expanding labor and other demands of our post-industrial economic system that sucks up female workers.  Perplexed and worried, those of us who find it harder and harder anymore to stay married respond emotionally to fearful media-hyped stories of abused and abandoned children, and to blustery Sunday sermons about Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.  

            Clearly, it's already too late to save much of American marriage (as this existed up to the 1970s) even if all the fifty states outlaw unions between homosexuals.  And one might ask those gay activists who are struggling to gain the right to marry (and the legal and economic benefits and respectability marriage offers) to also prepare us for the divorces that are sure to follow.  At least my ex-boyfriend hasn't cost me any alimony--unlike my mercenary ex-wife who spends my salary in Honolulu.  As human societies go, divorce rates in United States are recently creeping into the upper range.  Still, in some societies, almost everyone marries and divorces at least once and a 100% divorce rate in no way threatens the general social fabric.  Anthropologists call the marital pattern now emerging in the US "serial polygamy."  Most of us will have more than one spouse during our lifetimes, just not all at the same time.  Why even Frank Sinatra, that all-around American guy, good buddy of Jane and Nancy and Ron, had made it to wife number four.

            When I took my first anthropology course in 1971, my professor impressed on me the difficulty in coming up with a universal definition of marriage.  The multiple and complicated ways that humans around the world unite themselves are exceedingly difficult to encapsulate within a single label like "marriage."  In much of the world, including large parts of rural Utah, a man may have more than one wife.  In other places, such as the Himalayan highlands, three or four men (often brothers) will together be married to one woman.  Nuer women (of the southern Sudan) sometimes are married to dead men.  Their children (go figure how!) become the legal offspring of this ghost.  The Nayar of Kerala, southwestern India, were famously difficult for anthropologists trying to classify human marriage.  Nayar women do go through a ritual union with a man.  They might never sleep with him, though.  Instead, they remain in their mother's home merrily having sex and children with whomever they please. 

The term "marriage" accurately describes various sorts of gay or lesbian relationships in societies around the globe.   Some Nuer women, by exchanging cattle, marry another younger woman.  Her children are socially recognized as the children of the female "husband" who provided the bovine bride wealth.  The glossary of that 1971 anthropology text, politically correct avant la lettre, defined marriage in a way that omitted our Adam/Eve presumptions.  Human marriage is "an institutionalized form of relationship in which sexual relationships and parentage legitimately take place."  This definition would cover my new doggy friends, except for the fact that their union is illegitimate as defined by the law of the state in which they live.  There are other sources of legitimacy beyond the state, though.  My friends, and anyone else who wants to be joined, can establish a "domestic partnership" recognized by increasing numbers of communities and companies, and they may arrange for themselves a "holy union ceremony," offered by various churches, temples, and other religious groups.

This begs the question why gays and lesbians are demanding state-legitimized marriage just at the point in American history when straight marriage is in such deep hot water (we might call it).  Well, there's respect, of course.  And various tax and financial advantages.  And there're the kids.  You wouldn't want that innocent beagle to be illegitimate, would you?

Gay Bodies: Ink and Piercings

A few years ago, at a dinner party, my friend Andrew dropped his pants to show me his two scrotum piercings.  Or rather, he showed me one (a t-bar) and some ripped skin where the second had been.  He somehow had lost this on a flight from the UK to New Zealand.  (I didn't then want much to go into the details, halfway through my salad, of just how this loss could have occurred.)  Andrew since has somehow arranged a replacement.  He likes to fiddle with his ball jewelry, so he tells me, during long and tedious business meetings at the London architectural firm where he works.  A pierced and decorated scrotum, hanging there inside his pinstriped trousers, compensates for the boring businessman's garb he has to wear.

     Andrew is less happy with some of his other piercings.  He complains, in a recent email message: "I have JUST ABOUT decided to remove my nipple rings as I am fed up with the constant cycle of infections and crusty bits and agony when they get hit during sex, etc.  A mobile phone in the top pocket also causes considerable damage when running across the office.  No one has ever asked why I suddenly collapse in a heap swearing.  Anyway, the nipple rings are about as erogenous as a cattle prod up the arse (yes I know this would be Christmas for some people) so I think they will have to go."  He hopes, though, to get himself a tattoo by way of compensation for the sacrifice of his nipple décor.

     I am a fan of tattoos myself, so I hope Andrew does decide to undergo the inky needle.  No one knows where and when humans first transformed their bodies into works of art.  This certainly occurred thousands--perhaps tens of thousands--of years ago.  English speakers, in the late 18th century, borrowed the word "tattoo" from the Polynesian tatu.  James Cook, and his fellow explorers, came across richly decorated male Polynesian bodies in Tahiti, the Marquesas, Hawai'i, and New Zealand.  Eager sailors pulled up their shirts to offer their skin to the bone needles of Polynesian artists.  They thus imported Pacific tattoo designs back to Europe.  Tattooing quickly became a fad among both urbanites and the avant-garde rich (much as it is today, two centuries later).  This actually was a reintroduction of forgotten body art to Europe.  Ancient peoples from across Europe once also had decorated themselves by needling dyes under the skin.

     Oklahoma was one of only three of the United States that outlaw tattooing (making this legal only in 2009).  Here is a challenge for you:  Reflect anthropologically on Oklahoma culture and why this should fear tattoos.  Nonetheless, some of you may have come across a tattoo establishment that set up shop in the Brady District late last year.  Delighted, I took advantage of this local opportunity to have tattooed on me my Japanese inkan--the small, round name stamp that all banks in Japan demand one uses in order to deposit or withdraw any money.  Next time I am in Japan, I plan just to pull up my sleeve instead.

     No doubt I will horrify the bank ladies.  Tattooing in Japan (like Oklahoma) is scandalous.  This despite the fact that Japan has an internationally renowned tradition of brilliant full-body tattooing.  Japanese tattoos, however, are difficult to find and admire.  Many of the public baths I frequented had signs proclaiming "No tattoos allowed."  This reflects associations of tattoos with the yakuza--Japanese mafia gangs that control much of the underground economy.  One day, though, I had climbed Sakurajima volcano and was making my way down its backside.  I ran into a party of well-dressed sightseers sporting black patent leather shoes.  They offered me a ride back to the city in their van.  Squeezed into the back seat with two of my hosts, I noticed a tattooed wrist just showing from under a shirtsleeve cuff.  Soon, my new companions had happily pulled off their clothing to reveal magnificent kaleidoscopic tattoos covering every inch of their bodies, except head, hands, and feet.  Bygone yakuza sometimes arranged for themselves, when they died, to be partly skinned, and the skin tanned, in order to preserve their luxuriant tattoos.

     Few of us would be so willing to become altogether a body-art canvas.  Still, tattooing allows us to remodel our bodies and thereby our sense and presentation of self.  I recently wandered around Houston's gay ghetto, the Montrose district.  It could have been ancient Tahiti.  Many of us, too, will make handsome, decorated corpses. I am suggesting to Andrew that this time he just have a ring tattooed onto his nipple.  That way those troublesome cell phones won't get in the way.

Gay "CULTURE"

Nowadays everyone has his or her "culture."  This one-time anthropological term used to mean the system of knowledge shared by members of a society.   For anthropologists, thus, there is only one comprehensive culture in the U.S. despite the fact that American understandings of the world may be contested, variable, contradictory, and negotiated.  But for the rest of us, the term "culture" has become personalized.  Tormented by 1990s worries about losing, finding, building, eroding, establishing, proving, celebrating, and marketing identity, we have fervidly grasped this word to help make sense of who we are.  (There are good reasons why personal identity in late 20th century America is such a headache, but we can save those for another column.)

This all has led to "Let a thousand cultures bloom."  All over the country, we hear new talk of youth culture, gang culture, Chicano culture, Black culture, White culture (no trailer-trash jokes, please) and, closer to home, gay culture and lesbian culture.  One could argue that all these are just minor components of an encompassing albeit multifaceted American culture.  It is clear, though, that we have taken to phrasing our individual distinctiveness and why we are special in a language of "culture," and we struggle to defend the righteousness and honor of this particularized "cultural" uniqueness.

But I am not complaining about this recent popularization of anthropological jargon:  The more cultures out there, the more work there is for us anthropologists!  There is a lot of action around academia as scholars debate whether or not some distinctly gay culture, language, and lifestyle exist and, if they do, what exactly they are.  Politically, too, there is the debate between those who believe that gays are (or ought to be) just the same as everyone else with one minor erotic difference, and those who argue that there is a unique gay sensibility that should be celebrated, protected, and passed along to upcoming generations x, y, and z.

            I was thinking about difference--cultural or otherwise--when I stopped in Philadelphia last summer to visit my friend Lenny.  Lenny is African-American, gay, and deaf.  If he wanted to talk that way, he surely could claim to have a few more cultures than most of us do.  And there is some justification to admit a distinct deaf culture, if one associates cultural boundaries with language difference.  Lenny's native language, like most deaf people, is American Sign Language (ASL).  ASL has its own set of morphological and syntactic rules that are independent of English.  Unlike most fashionable warnings of multicultural bewilderment, Lenny would be right if he wore a t-shirt marked with the ASL signs for, "You wouldn't understand.  It's a Deaf thing."

            Lenny's command of written English grammar is spotty, but he is brilliant at negotiating the boundaries between deaf and hearing as well as all the other boundaries (gay/straight; male/female; black/white) that most of the rest of us also encounter daily.  I first met Lenny several years ago as he made the rounds of a downtown Philadelphia club with small notebook and pencil stub in hand.  His bar-talk took the form of short notes that he rapidly scrawled in his own version of English.  (Lenny could scribble impressively fast.)  He then handed over the notebook and pencil, and waited for a written response.  Last Summer I ran into Lenny again in a bar in New Hope, PA.  He was the only deaf person there but was having a great time socializing with his hearing friends and, perhaps, arranging some more intimate date for that evening.  It would be a unique challenge for many of us, I imagine, to scribble and make love at the same time.

            Lenny's cross-cultural skills in navigating the deaf/hearing divide are much better than mine.  He took me along to a club where Philadelphia's deaf gay community meets every second week or so.  The room was crowded with people all vigorously signing among themselves.  This was one of the oddest bar experiences I ever have had.  No noise.  No talk.  No wild laughter or greetings yelled from across the room.  Just a rich, silent choreography of hand and arm gestures, a hushed language of bodies and the quiet motion of faces.  Unlike me, the two or three other hearing people there knew ASL.  One of them complained, though, that he was getting a headache trying to make sense of the conversations around him since most people were holding drinks and were signing one-handedly.  Although in unfamiliar territory, I still knew enough about gay American "bar culture" successfully to order a drink (…"read my lips, bartender, wwhiittte wwiinne"…) and to not otherwise make too much a fool out of myself.

            As Americans living in the same society, even when our "cultural" differences are greatest (as between the English-speaking hearing and the ASL-signing deaf), we still have a lot in common.  In fact, the various personal differences that we pursue, maintain, and today protect as cultural--like those asserted to exist between gay and straight--only can be recognized and made sense of as parts of the larger, American cultural whole.  Lenny is deaf, but he is also gay.  He is black, but he is also African-American.  Like all of us nowadays, Lenny is "multicultural" (gay plus whatever else), but only in the singularly American sense of this word.

Ask and Tell: Sacred Bands of Thebes

American military leaders argue that overt homosexuals among their men would undermine unit solidarity and camaraderie.  It is remarkable that many peoples, here and there in world history, have come to exactly the opposite conclusion.  I was thinking about this when I went to visit my friend Hank in San Diego after New Year's Day.  Hank is into his second tour of duty for the Navy--and Hank is gay.  As do many small town North Carolina boys, he joined the Navy to see the world and escape the boonies.  He was stationed on O'ahu and like a lot of Navy personnel aroused by Hawai'i's blaring sunsets and thick tropical twilight, he eventually found his way down to Hula's.  Hula's is Waikiki's main gay club, built around a magnificent, gigantic banyan tree.  The club enjoys an eclectic clientele of hungry tourists, raucous locals, and wayward servicemen.  Hank now works at a naval installation in San Diego and he took me on a tour of his favorite dives in the Hillcrest District.

            It is no surprise that the once all-male military, like the priesthood, the Boy Scouts, and the college fraternity, continues to attract numbers of men who like to hang out with men.  Hank currently lives under that curious regime of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (which, as we learned recently, does not entirely apply to AOL personal profiles).  This policy only makes official what has long been standard operating procedure in the military.  Hank is killer cute, and both remarkably gentle and vivacious.  It occurred to me that only the dullest and most obtuse of his superior officers could remain unaware of his sexual preferences.   But, clearly, they pretend not to notice while he pretends he could be straight.  In this odd military world of make-believe, he joins thousands of other gay and lesbian service personnel who, if not always comfortable, are proud of and committed to their military careers. 

            Most of us have come across gay or lesbian soldiers, cadets, or sailors in one place or another.  It is obvious that the numerous uniformed homosexuals who have always been in the armed forces are not working everyday havoc upon the military's ethos of brotherhood or corps unity.  Indeed, in some cultures, homosexual relations among military men functioned to intensify male camaraderie so that men were even more willing to sacrifice their lives both for their boyfriends and for the greater good.  

In particular, age-structured homosexuality in which younger, junior youths took lovers among older, superior men was common in a variety of societies where men had to go to war.  Enlisted men here, one could say, really loved their officers.  Most of us have read about customary relations between older and younger men among the ancient Greeks.  The story of Achilles and his lover Patroclus, killed at the battle of Troy, explored how love between men inspired a militaristic ardor of bravery, ferocity, and sacrifice.  Cross-cultural evidence indicates that gay men at war have been as brutal, bloodthirsty, and cruel as anyone else, particularly when their boyfriends are endangered.

Samurai warriors during Japan's Tokugawa era also often took lovers among their pages and military subordinates (see Male Colors, Gary Leupp's 1995 book on Tokugawa homosexuality).  These lovers were together both in bed and on the battlefield.  Even when the Tokugawa shoguns at last managed to suppress feudal warfare after 1605, and required the majority of the samurai clans to leave their fortresses and castles and move into the cities, men from this class retained their customary homosexuality.  Quarrels over boyfriends were a major cause of street crime and unrest in 17th century Japanese towns and cities.  Samurai men were allowed to wear two swords--one long and one short--and they knew how to use them.

            When Hank and I were in the Hillcrest bars, I observed the crowds drinking, playing pool, and flirting and talking together, trying to guess just who else was in the Navy.  Unlike Tokugawa Japan, when these men leave the bars they have to revert to passing as straight--or at least to that curious military world wherein everyone pretends massive ignorance.  That evening, I went out to an Italian restaurant with Hank, Hank's wife, Hank's wife's child, and Hank's wife's girlfriend.  The military, and Hollywood, are the two institutions in American society that are doing the most to promote homosexual marriage:  the defensive although nonetheless often happy unions of thousands of gay men and lesbian women.