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.
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