Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

The internal contradiction for American minorities is always that of assimilation versus identity. Real assimilation, the melting pot that does indeed cook European ethnic minorities into homogenous Americans, is not within the grasp of racial minorities, yet something near enough to it exists to appeal to the occasional Clarence Thomas. By contrast, the gay minority crystallizes out of the melting pot. No one should be surprised, especially when the way seems difficult and more especially in the face of an unexpected tragedy like AIDS, that more than a few voices would be raised from within the gay community itself, urging the disintegration of gay identity—just to let go and relax back into the melting pot as Velveeta chunks relax into queso dip in the microwave.

Frank Browning is one of those voices. His is a particularly accessible voice, for it is not lost in the usual deconstructionist gibberish which cloaks most such suggestions. Browning puts the question rather clearly: "Do gay people exist?" This is not to be mistaken for the obviously foolish questions of whether homosexuality exists or of whether there are not people who prefer homosexual relations. Rather it is whether anything substantial exists or ought to exist in gay identity.

This is a question much easier to contemplate in the relative safety of New York City, San Francisco, or Seattle, than in Dallas, El Paso, or Houston—not to mention Durham, or Biloxi or Cobb County, Georgia.

Browning's method of exploring this question is through accounts of his raising the example of the Sambians to a variety of his nominally gay friends and associates. The Sambians are one pseudonymous people of New Guinea among whom all males are required to participate in homosexual activities at the age of initiation. There are other peoples of New Guinea who require other forms of male homosexuality, and of course there are very numerous cultures in which some homosexuality is expected—but not actually required—of everyone, at one age or another. The Sambians, however, seem to have some special significance to Browning. While the symbolism and context of the Sambian ritual is very rich, the salient point, to Browning, is that the Sambian boys do not become gay, or homosexual, or identified as such by their homosexual couplings—indeed, they can only become "regular guys" by participating in them.

Browning rather thoroughly demolishes, at least for himself and his friends, the idea that there is any inherent identity in a particular sexual act. It is a straw man. Yes, there are times and places that it does not mean anything, just as there were times and places that race, as we know the idea, was just as irrelevant. If people on both sides of the issue did not think there was a significance to sexuality, there would be no conflict, and without the conflict there would be no point to a gay identity. The same, of course, may be said for any minority, any distinctive group: if no one were to observe the distinction, it would cease to exist. No doubt this is the reason that the question of the value of gay identity tends to be raised where the distinction has fewer teeth.

A curious effect in such places is the strange competition to claim the word "queer" by people who are not homosexual. Browning, himself, was apparently heterosexual in practice for a large part of his life, and many of his companions in his dialogues are reported to be bisexual in practice. Yet, they jealously cling to either "gay" or "queer" as an identity. Little wonder Browning finds gay identity so disposable: it is difficult to find a lifelong, exclusive homosexual—a Kinsey six—anywhere in his book. This is what Fate metes out to the gay movement for so long insisting that there is no such thing as a bisexual. Evidently many bisexuals now believe it. The figures were before us all the time. We knew, always should have known, that there were many times more bisexuals than homosexuals. Those who thought it was a good idea to recruit bisexuals by defining them in must now see that the inevitable result is the bisexualization of "gay" and "queer" and the identities that those words represent.

A fact of Sambian life that Browning finds convenient to overlook is that some Sambians are known to the others to prefer homosexual relations and to seek to persist in having them beyond the prescribed period. The Sambians disapprove very strongly of such people and object to such practices as running counter to rationale of the ritual acts. The preferential homosexuals are as much outcasts among the Sambians, as exclusive, lifelong homosexuals are likely to be among bisexual-queers.

This is A Queer Geography indeed.