At Home in a World of Strangers. Towards a Comparison of Gay Urban
Cultures
The following text is a summary of a research proposal turned down by the Dutch Foundation for Scholarly Research. There seem to be, however, possibil- ities that the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs will offer scholarships to Ph.D. candidates from "Third World"-countries to do such and other gay and lesbian studies related research. There may be also other organizations who will give grants for such studies, or scholars who already work on comparable topics. Students who might be interested to start such research, or scholars who are already involved in it, are kindly requested to contact Gert Hekma, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Department of Sociology, Oude Hoogstraat 24, 1012 CE Amsterdam or email hekma@pscw.uva.nl, also for other information and the complete text of the proposal. The text is also on the website of Amsterdam Gay and Lesbian Studies, http://www.pscw.uva.nl/gl. In connection with the "Queer Games"-conference, Amsterdam, July 29-31, 1998 in Amsterdam, we might devote a session to the theme of gay urban cultures.
The project was developed by Gert Hekma in co-operation with Gilbert Herdt (Chicago) and Peter Geschiere (African Studies, Leyden).
Introduction
It is our proposal to do research on gay cultures in a series of urban centres around the world and to raise similar questions in the different contexts concern- ing a series of themes as space, identity, gender, age. As most research has been on cities in the western world, we want to focus on urban centers in other parts of the world. We want to include cities from Latin-America, sub-saharan Africa, the Arab world, South-East Asia and Central/Eastern Europe because these cities diverge largely with regard to general and gay culture. The choice for specific cities is based on their scale starting with about a million inhabitants and on the existence of important gay worlds. Another, central part of the research will be directed to a developing global gay culture and its relation to local cultures.
For some decades, scholars have assumed gay identities and gay cultures have forms that are historically, culturally and geographically specific. Most research is however done from the perspective of one specific place and time and the few examples of cross-cultural comparison have been quite unsatisfactory. Some examples of research focusing on specific cultures are Herdt on the "Sambia", Parker on Brazil, Jackson on Thailand, Carrier on Mexico, etc.
Gay culture is circumscribed as the social and spatial organization of sexual practices between males and the representations of these practices. Although it is very unjust to use the concept gay beyond its cultural borders (the anglosaxon world) we do so for reasons of simplicity and comparaison. Research will stress the spatial organization of gay cultures because gay culture needs a space to be expressed. The embedment of gay space and culture in public space and general culture will be a central focus of the project.
Choosing for a sexual ambition that is highly marginalized nearly every- where, can make local organizations of sexual culture very clear. Margins illuminate what are the sexual rules and boundaries of a culture. At the same time and amazingly, it is precisely the marginal style that develops very succesfully on a global scale. Strong social and sexual relations have developed among gay men around the world. An international gay culture has come into existence that has everywhere its local flavours. In this project, local organiz- ations of gay space are compared, as are local and global gay cultures.
The focus is on urban cultures because gay cultures in general have their sites in the city and not in the countryside. Historians have analyzed the rise of sexual identities as a result of growing urbanization and social differentiation. In a recent sex survey, it was found that gay men not only go to live in cities, but that greater numbers of them had grown up in urban than in non-urban environ- ments.
Western, especially North-American gay culture is spreading around the world and it might be one of the most successful export products of the west in the intimate sphere. By way of the media and sex tourism men all over the world become acquainted with western gay lifestyles. Travel books and tourist guides help to create an international gay culture by showing foreigners (not always very reliably) where the locals meet. Gay tourism has such an impact because it combines economic profits and cultural models with intimate pleasures and desires. But it seems that the level of copying western models of homosexuality varies over the world. Africa and the Arab world seem to be more resistent, whereas Latin-America and South-East Asia seem to be more open to it.
Of course the question of globalization of gay culture will be answered as an end result of our project. We could give some clues as to indicate where we want to look. The international gay culture of occidental origin could be defined by the following traits: (1) gay defined spaces including institutions as bars and media; (2) a gay language; (3) gay identities and "coming out" as gay to the world (to one's parents especially); (4) desiring relations based on equality of gender identity and (5) of age and (6) with exchangeability of sexual roles. This delineation informs the structure of the following proposal in which these traits ground the structure of the paragraphs. As far as we can ascertain, these aspects are something specifically western that do not exist in this combination in other cultures. Other elements of the western gay identity are developing, as the desire for coupled life or gay marriage and specific spatial requirements.
An interesting question is whether and to what extent local and interna- tional models exist next to each other in non-western cities (see Parker 1991, Carrier 1995), and if so, on what basis local people make a choice for the one or the other culture and identity. Some measure of gay syncretism will however be developed because the locals have to adapt international models to local use. In our understanding, there can be no gay identity without gay spaces and institu- tions. But of course a gay identity can be imported from abroad, for example from tourists, by readings or by visiting gay places elsewhere.
In the proposal, we discuss at some length the topics of (1) gay spaces, (1.1)
sexual border traffic, (2) slang, (3) gay identities, (4) gender identity, (5) age
and (6) sexuality. Sexual border traffic refers to socio-sexual relations between
men who identify more as gay and those who identify more as heterosexual, as
with "queer" and "trade", "maricone" and "macho". Space gets a central place
because sex always has a spatial location, from bars, bedrooms, boudoirs and
cottages to churches, barracks, parks, tramways, and so forth. There are
geographies of desire. In the rejected proposal we included the cities of Budapest
(Hungary), Cairo (Egypt), Capetown (South-Africa), Madras (India) and
Managua (Nicaragua), but these were more examples than definitive decisions.
The main aim of the project is (still) to do research in these cities with a similar
set of questions and themes, making a comparaison possible and raising new
questions and themes as a result of an ongoing discussion between the
participants. Part of the programm should be conferences with comparaisons of
urban gay cultures, focussing on the themes and the results of the research. The
methodology is historical-anthropological, relying on participant observation,
interviews, archival research and the exploration of some gay scandals.