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.

Priests and Shaman: In Between Heaven and Earth, Male and Female

I lived for a couple of years in a village on an isolated island in what today is the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.  I was at one time the only American on this island until a Catholic priest arrived from the U.S.  He had been assigned to a mission station about three miles walk away from me, down along a rocky coastline.   This was Père Bob.  (Up until then, all priests serving the Catholic mission had been French-speaking pères.)  Père Bob was hospitable and engaging; he was also vigilantly taken care of by a gaggle of Italian nuns, and he had laid in a fine supply of wine and whiskey. 

Père Bob was interested in island culture and language and he often joined local men and boys who gathered at dark village clearings each evening to prepare and drink kava, the Pacific's traditional drug substance.  Kava ordinarily has light depressant, mood-leveling effects, something like valium.  It wasn't long before teen-aged boys were whispering to me that Père Bob, everyone zoned out on kava, would sometimes feel them up.  The boys weren't upset about this; they just giggled at the père's sexual eccentricity.  It came to me then that the connections between religion and sexuality are long and twisted in human history. 

Whatever one believes about the supernatural, the problem in all religions is one of access and communication.  Who controls the flow of messages back and forth between humans and the gods?   Specialist mediators operate in most religions as supernatural guides, as did Père Bob, in his own way, on my island.  Many cultures presume gays and lesbians to bridge fundamental gender categories.  Religious systems have often built, metaphorically, on this positional intermediacy of gays and lesbians.  Homosexuals (however culturally conceived), who themselves are in between gender categories are effective religious mediators linking humans and the gods.  Mohave Indian cross-dressers, for example, traditionally, often were powerful shaman; they cured sickness by contacting the world of the spirits.  Cross-dressers in India, the hijras, similarly possess powerful abilities to bless and to curse based on their close links to the Mother Goddess.  (Anyone interested in hijras, a few of whom are hermaphrodites and some of whom ritually emasculate themselves, might have a look at my friend Serena Nanda's book Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India (1990).)

Anthropologist Weston La Barre once suggested that original human religion everywhere was shamanistic and therefore relatively egalitarian.  Although people might turn to part-time specialist shamans to diagnose and cure disease and for other sorts of assistance with the supernatural, everyone had the capacity and the right to contact his or her own ancestors or other family spirits.  With the development of agriculture, though, religion and social life in general became much more hierarchical.  When the great religions--the religions of the book--appeared in human history, they quickly acquired an official monopoly on spiritual mediation.  Priesthoods, notably, emerged and gained control of tallking to the gods.

Organized priesthoods may have secured the function of mediating with spirits but they have not escaped issues of sexuality and religious function.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, particularly since the 12th century has symbolically remarked the powers of its priestly mediators through an elaboration of celibacy.  But some of the same sorts of people whose intermediate sexuality once would have led them to take up the spiritual quests of the shaman nowadays become clergy within religion organizations that are hostile to homosexuality.  Nonetheless, some of the best priests and pastors, at least in my experience, are lesbian or gay.  In this, they maintain a wide-spread, cross-cultural tradition of great antiquity.

My friend William now studies in a seminary in the east.  He is a monk on his way to the priesthood.  He loves men and, I should also tell you, he is super cute.  I worry about William.  Sometimes I suspect he has thrown himself into a celibate church as a means to control a personal sexuality that discomforts and vexes him.  Marriage to the church means never having to go on a date.  "This is dangerous overkill," I plead with him:  "Can't you become a priest after you are old and ugly?"  But part of me knows he is realizing a primal human cultural pattern.  Those who find themselves in between male and female also move easily between earth and heaven.  William's retreat to the monastery might be a loss to the gay bars--that mundane world of the flesh--but it is a gain for the realm of the spirit.  I am glad that the messenger who helps carry my prayers up to the gods is so beautiful.

Big Noses, etc. in Japan

The Japanese like their gaijin ('foreigners') to have big noses. I worked for a number of months at a university in the far southern Japanese city Kagoshima whose foreign population mostly consists of snub-nosed Chinese and Korean immigrants.  Only a handful of Americans and Europeans live in that city.  Most of these are employed teaching English in local secondary schools.  Because of this, unlike Tokyo or Osaka, gaijin are infrequent patrons of the city's several gay bars.

            When I dropped in one of these establishments, the bartenders and patrons were invariably polite and curious about how I had come to live in Kagoshima.  My Japanese improved enough to answer the stock set of questions always asked:  Why was I there?  What did I do?  Was I married?  Didn't I find Kagoshima people friendlier than other Japanese?  Did I like Japanese men (or food, or drink, or housing, or the weather, etc. etc. etc.)?

But I always sensed my new bar-friends checking out my nose.  Gay Japanese share our folk belief that big nose equals big penis and I was frequently apologetic that my nose is of modest dimension.  I did very soon learn the phrase anata no chinpo wa okii desuka?  ('is your dick big?').  I wasn't telling.  Amerika-jin were still scarce enough in Kagoshima that people wanted to check out rumors of Western endowment.  I once met a young American wandering the entertainment district.  He was handing out flyers for a strip show later that night.  He claimed to been enslaved by a crooked Japanese entrepreneur who had brought him to town to strip at a local club for Japanese woman hungry to see white naked flesh.  This boy looked gay to me.  He invited me to a performance but I didn't want to get in the way of those eager women.

I made friends with Eichiro who was one of the handful of people in Kagoshima who spoke English well.  Eichiro had taken English courses in New York City and had worked at his uncle's Japanese restaurant in Glendale, California.  He met an American boyfriend in Hawai'i, and the two of them had returned to Kagoshima to be near Eichiro's mother.  Back home, he had taken a job as a bartender in a small place that catered to Japan's growing numbers of professional working women.  (Young Japanese women are fascinated by gays.)  I hung out there, too, hungry to talk English.

Eichiro was 30 but was obviously going to remain perpetually, terminally cute.  I would walk downtown to the bar, drink a couple of glasses of hot shoju (Kagoshima's infamous sweet potato brandy), and then leave before 11:00 pm so I could catch a bus home.  (Kagoshima's city council is in cahoots with the taxi companies--public transport stops about 11:00 and drinkers have to fall into taxis when the bars close.)  Eichiro and I soon developed a routine. Each time I was making to leave, he would beg to follow along and check out my chinpo in the darkened stairwell. 

"No, Eichiro, you are married."  He was, too.  A lesbian minister had married him and the American boyfriend on the beach in Waikiki.  But Eichiro would claim to be so frantic for gaijin chinpo that he could even forego the shower he normally had to have after sex.  How so Japanese, I thought.  Good bartenders always know how to make one feel special.

I was lonely for Americans so I called up the boyfriend one day and asked him to lunch.  He insisted on eating only at McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Mr. Donut, or Subway--the four US chains that have found their way to distant Kagoshima.  We met at Subway.  I didn't like boyfriend much.  He whined about Kagoshima and the Japanese.  He did have a mother-of-a-nose, though.  He and Eichiro were planning a return to Los Angeles where they would live by selling the Japanese antiques that they had accumulated over two years in Kagoshima.  Boyfriend left first and Eichiro followed a month behind.  I said my goodbyes. 

But a few weeks later, Eichiro called me at my office.  "Eichiro!  What on earth are you doing here?" I asked.  He had arrived at LAX where US Immigration immediately arrested him and threw him back on the next plane for Japan.  He was on the blacklist, having overstayed his previous visa by 18 months.  I helped Eichiro fill out the immigration lottery form that the American Embassy in Tokyo had sent him as his only chance for a US Visa.  It didn't seem very promising to me.

I left Japan soon afterwards.  Six months later, when I returned to the US, I sent a postcard to Kagoshima addressed to Linda--Eichiro's bar name.  It came back marked "unknown."  I started calling the 28 Japanese restaurants in Glendale one after the other but gave up, feeling foolish, after a dozen or so.   Eichiro--where are you?  I sure hope you've found your way to the land of the free, the home of the big nose.

GE and HOMO BARS IN JAPAN

Kagoshima, like all Japanese cities, is both ugly and beautiful at the same time.  It lies along the eastern shores of a superb harbor in the far south of the southern island Kyushu.  Sakurajima (‘Cherry Island’) squats down just offshore in the center of the bay.  This is a massive, hulking volcano, 3500 feet tall, that erupts continuously sending plumes of ash and smoke skywards into the stratosphere.  With every west wind, a sprinkling of black, crystalline volcanic ash covers everything in town.  Kagoshima bay itself was once the crater of a huge, prehistoric volcano, one wall of which collapsed to let in the sea.  Whenever I was depressed, I could always look up at Sakurajima and imagine the city laid ruin, smoking under twenty feet of burning, creeping lava.

            In 1995, I went to live in Kagoshima for seven months.  I moved into a gaijin shukusha (foreign-style lodging) built on the rim of the old caldera.  From here, I could walk downtown in about an hour or take one of the many passing buses or streetcars.  Kagoshima, as is typical of Japanese cities, has a concentrated entertainment district.  Tenmonkan is about 10 square blocks of hundreds of tiny bars, clubs, movie theaters, restaurants, food stands, and pachinko (Japanese pinball) parlors.  The Americans bombed Kagoshima flat during the Pacific War and most buildings in town are ugly cement mid-rises thrown up in the 1950s.  Drinking establishments of all sorts squeeze into every corner of these five and six story buildings.

My first two weeks in town, nearly every night I went bar-hopping.  Here was my challenge:  Could I find a gay bar?  In a city of 500,000, so I figured, there had to be one or two.  I hardly spoke any Japanese, although I had diligently practiced some useful words and sentence structures.   Worse, my knowledge of the three orthographies that Japanese use was nil so I couldn’t read any of the thousands of neon signs that lit the night.  Japanese urban streetscape is a confusing riot of color and sound.  And, although all Japanese take at least six years of English in school, hardly anyone--in Kagoshima at least--would admit to knowing any Eigo.

And I was a bit hesitant to ask.  Who might I shock or insult by inquiring, “uh, do you know any gay bars?”  And I’m enough of an American to have absorbed our masculine cultural imperative:  NEVER ASK DIRECTIONS.  So I walked around.  I checked out the environs of the train and bus stations.  I consulted the Spartacus guide (no Kagoshima).  I telephoned a bar listed therein in the larger city, Fukuoka, across the island and had an unhappy conversation in pidgin Japanese.  I followed (surreptitiously, I hoped) guys around who looked gay.  But could I tell?  What was the gay-look in Japan anyway?.  Still, I hoped they would lead me somewhere.

I gave up.  After two weeks I went into a place named, I hoped propitiously, The Down Under.  (Many Japanese establishments favor English names.)  It turned out that this specialized in Australian beers, the proprietor having lived several years in Queensland.  He was there tending bar and, since it was early for local drinkers, he had only a few customers.  After the usual small talk about why I was in Kagoshima, I nervously asked the question:

“Uh, are there any gay bars in town?”

“Why of course,” he replied quickly grabbing a napkin to sketch a map that would lead me through the unnamed streets of the city.  

"Well, that was easy," I thought with some relief.  I managed to find the building indicated on the map, locating the bar up on the 4th floor by comparing signs with the kanji characters he had drawn on my napkin.  It was 9:00 pm, the indicated opening hour, so I opened the door and edged inside.  The place was empty except for a group of guys dressed as waiters lounging at a table. They all jumped up and one, who spoke some English, came over to me. 

"Did I know where I was?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "Isn't this a gay bar?"  I showed him my map.

"Well, yes," he replied, "but did I really want a gay bar?  What exactly did I like?  Men, or men dressed as woman?"

It dawned on me that a ge ba ('gay bar'), at least in Kagoshima, is a bar where straight businessmen, the hip, and the adventurous come to be entertained by guys in drag--mostly dressed in exquisite kimono.  Tables begin at about $100 which buys part of a bottle of whiskey and a beautiful boy-girl in silk kimono and classical wig who fills your glass with ice and tops it off with whiskey after every sip.  I should have been asking for homo ba ('homo bar') since this is where the guys hang out.  The waiter, who admitted to being a student at the university I was visiting, very kindly took me by the arm and led me around the block to where three poky homo ba were located, stacked one above the other in a tall, narrow building.

There are five homo ba in Kagoshima, all of which are similar.  All are snaku--the sort of establishment whose standard cover charge ($10-$15) includes a small plate of snacks that accompanies one's drinks.  Each boasts powerful karaoke machines and clienteles of eager but very indifferent singers.  These homo ba do not sort thematically in the American way (into country, or disco, or techno, or drag, and so on).  Rather, locals claim only that they are age-graded:  one is for the younger crowd, one is "mixed," and one toshi yuri--older gentlemen only.  They all looked mixed to me.  I felt sorry for Kagoshima's lesbians.  If they want to drink they probably have to go to Tokyo.

Until I left Kagoshima, I watched everyday at the university for that student-waiter who led me to the city's hidden homo ba.  I wanted to thank him but I never met him again.