Herdt - Same Sex, Different Cultures: Exploring Gay And Lesbian Lives

Same Sex, Different Cultures

Same Sex, Different Cultures

Exploring Gay and Lesbian Lives

Gilbert Herdt

First published 1997 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herdt, Gilbert H., 1949

Same sex, different cultures : exploring gay and lesbian lives / Gilbert Herdt.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8133-3163-3 (hc).ISBN 0-8133-3164-1 (pb)

1. Homosexuality. 2. Lesbianism. 3. Gay menCross-cultural studies. 4. LesbiansCross-cultural studies. I. Title.

GN484.35.H47 1997

306.766dc21

97-1839

CIP

Chapter 3 reprints approximately five pages of Gilbert Herdt, Fetish and Fantasy in Sambia Initiation, which was originally published as chapter 3 of Gilbert Herdt, ed., Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-3164-5 (pbk)

To the memory of Ruth Benedict

Contents

TO DESIRE THE SAME GENDER and to create relationships based on love and sex with another man or woman are to stake a claim on history and culture. This is true not only because those who have openly dared to love the same gender have been punished and forced to flee from their own lands. It is also true because controversies surrounding homosexuality remain a vital part of the debate about what is normal and natural in the range of sexual variation and the tolerance accorded sexual minorities in all human societies. Fortunately, we live in a time in which the story of gays and lesbians across cultures and in the United States is being uncovered and in this way liberated from political censorship and repression. The history of persons who have desired the same gender is also being rewritten in order to understand and reclaim the lost and invisible lives of gays and lesbians hidden from society and hidden from history. This is the spirit in which I have written this book: to open the world of sexual lifeways across cultures to readers who would like to understand the place of their own sexuality and their own sexual culture in that world.

Let me begin the introduction to this book with my own journey to New Guinea. It was early September 1974 when I set off by foot from the Marawaka Patrol Station in the Eastern Highlands Province of the New Guinea Highlands, where I first met the Sambia people. In those days there were no roads or airstrips. I trekked two and a half days across three mountain chains to their isolated valleys and villages. As I traveled from place to place in search of a field site, I was struck by the lonely beauty of the jungles and the steady and confident way in which these peoples had preserved a valued way of life in the face of constant warfare and the difficulties of the climate and land. On entering the village, I was taken directly to the mens house, for there the elders and war leaders held council, and they would decide my fate. Out in the plaza of the hamlet were a swarm of happy faces of children, the younger ones shy, the older ones openly curious about the strange white man who had come from the outside. But inside the mens house I was surrounded by a group of strong young warriors and much younger ritual initiates who made up the core of the village fighting force in times of war. They were the pride and hope of the village, the next generation that would assume the mantle of power and the hard work of hunting and building gardens that made the Sambia economy. How could I guess that these men and boys were all active participants in an ancient ritual complex of homoerotic relations that in all likelihood stretched thousands of years into the dim past? Even less could I imagine that such a structure of same-gender relations was the very means by which masculinity was created not only in Sambia culture but also in all the neighboring societies that have now been studied.

It was impossible for me to understand this at the time, even though I was myself very sensitive to exploring how to express my emerging same-gender desires. I had grown up in a society in which everyone assumed that I was heterosexual, including my parents, and so did I. As a child in a small town in rural Kansas in the 1950s, homosexuality was barely whispered about as a sin and disease of terrible proportions. In fact, I never heard the word homosexual or faggot spoken until I got into high school, and there I sensed that it was an accusation to be avoided, if at all possible, because of the permanent stigma and dishonor it brought. Like most of the people of my generation, it was only in college, away from family and community, that I began to experiment with sexuality as an adult, first thinking of myself as bisexual in my relations with women and other men. In the late 1960s I attended university in California, and there, for the first time, I experienced intimacy with a male friend in college. But those days were so filled with study and work, amid protests against the Vietnam War and the now-long-vanished cultural happenings of the peace and freedom movement and hippies, that my sexual experimentation seemed characteristic of the time. Only as the gay and lesbian movement took hold and I began to think of myself as gay did I start to practice a new identity and roleand this carried more significant consequences for my standing in society and in the academic hierarchy. After all, homophobia and violence against gays and lesbians were accepted. It was about this time, however, that I headed off to New Guineaa period that was to forever change my life.

I am a cultural anthropologist, classically trained in the old-fashioned mode, which requires many years of fieldwork in many different field trips to understand how life is lived in another culture. To be welcomed into a small village community and be adopted as one of its own; to learn an unwritten language and immerse oneself in the strange customs and foods of a place far removed from ones own people and place; to feel the emotions and the troubles of these people as they encounter the eternal rhythm of birth and marriage and death; and to befriend and understand how the people themselves reflect on what it means to be a Sambia from birth until the gravethese are the basic and enriching as well as the most humbling experiences a human being can ever know. In the field of anthropology as well as in the other social sciences that deal with such problems, many of these issues have been written about at length. Nearly always, however, sexuality is left out or sometimes wiped clean from the pages of the book that emerges from study. But if this is true for sexuality in general, and much of what counts as heterosexuality, how much more true it is for homosexuality and bisexuality and the understanding of lesbians and gays in particular! And here is where my experience was special among the Sambia.