Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have made us all laugh when he said Iran’s got no gays, but some of America’s queers are agreeing with him. Columbia Queers – of Columbia University – released the following constructionist statement:
We would like to strongly caution media and campus organizations against the use of such words as “gay,” “lesbian,” or “homosexual” to describe people in Iran who engage in same-sex practices and feel same-sex desire. The construction of sexual orientation as a social and political identity and all of the vocabulary therein is a Western cultural idiom.
As such, scholars of sexuality in the Middle East generally use the terms “same-sex practices” and “same-sex desire” in recognition of the inadequacy of Western terminology.
Such an argument comes up a lot in academic and intellectual circles. Sexuality’s a Western construct, hammered out over decades of scientific, psychiatric and religious study.
Apparently Chris Crain doesn’t travel in such high-minded circles because he manages to equate the Queers’ progressive political statement as support of Ahmadinejad:
There you have it, the radicals of the left tolerating even the most brutal forms of intolerance on the right. It’s bad enough that “scholars of sexuality in the Middle East” are, like the Iranian president, so anti-West and anti-gay that they would write us out of existence. But it’s downright depressing to see bright young minds so tortured by self-hatred for their own culture than they buy into the bullshit.
It seems to us that Crain may be buying into the bullshit. While we agree that Ahmadinejad’s a total nutter, we also agree that Americans and the media need to think outside the proverbial box. Unfortunately, gays of a certain age, politics can’t seem to get their short-sighted imaginations around such a topic.
Paul Raposo
I sorta agree with Mr. Crain; by desperately trying to avoid naming a sexuality, people are often reduced to a sexual act. This is the same ideal that brought us such phrases as, “practicing homosexual” and, “homosexual tendencies.” It completely ignores those Iranians and middle east persons who–try as they might–live in same-sex relationships that are more than just about anal sex.
And he does make a point about too many liberals accepting the sort of intolerance from other people, that they would never accept from Americans. Which is funny, the above argument gives the impression that Americans are more enlightened that Iranians. But aren’t we told that everyone is equal, with no nation superior to any other?
kel777
I totally agree with Crain, this attitude is absolute bullshit. Yes, there are gays in Iran, and no sexuality is not a fucking ‘western construct’ – RIDICULOUS. This is more BS from western bourgeois gays who don’t give a shit about anyone else.
kel777
Another thing: ‘gay’ is to a large degree an activist construct, sure. It is NOT a ‘western’ construct. Don’t these idiots realize giving a name to something nameless is the first step? Once Iranian gays are no longer in fear of being executed they will be able to come out. And only then we will consider them ‘gay’? What a crock. Where do they find these people?
WWH
Whoever wrote that has been failed by Columbia University.
ghh3456
Why are people so resistant to the idea that maybe people outside the United States think differently than we do? Isn’t that resistance part of what got us into the War in Iraq in the first place?
Before you accuse me of being an Ivy League liberal, I should say that I’m a gay Republican college dropout. I’m just tired of my fellow gays (1) being so dismissive of academics (that is SO Lynne Cheney circa 1988), and (2) relying on such rigid notions of identity. Shouldn’t that be what we work against?
fakechildhood
yes columbia queers got it right yall.
“gay-ness” and “same-sex desire” whatever we want to call it looks different in every society and culture. fact.
sexuality is not a western construct, but it is a construct. a construct that looks different in every society and culture. the idea of “gay” as we understand it often times on this blog is a western construct.
kel777
all ‘gayness’ means is ‘same sex desire’
it doesn’t mean anything else, and it is not cultural.
Aside from this, the Iranian president stated that there were no homosexuals in Iran. Nothing was said about ‘gay,’ if you insist that ‘gay’ is some western cultural construct (I don’t).
I consider ‘gay’ an activist construct which has to do with all humanity. It is merely an identity used as a weapon to reverse cultural sexual repression. It’s also been very effective where it’s been used. This is a human rights issue, not a cultural tolerance issue. This is getting absurd.
Aside from all this, I have met several middle easterners who identify as gay.
ds
kell77, I have to call bullshit on your comment.
Imposing Western identities on other cultures is not only stupid and ethnocentric, but it’s also the same attitude that we’ve used to justify the pillaging of resources (e.g. oil) across the world.
“Don’t these idiots realize giving a name to something nameless is the first step?”
I don’t know how to say it any more clearly than “YOU ARE IMPOSING A NAME ON SOMEONE ELSE.”
That same fucked up attitude is how we legitimize getting involved (aka “destroying”) in other nations’ affairs… “We know what’s best!”
It’s called paternalism. Look it up.
hisurfer
The Columbia Queers used a lot of big words that Crain et al. might not understand. It wasn’t a defense of Iran. They were using this as a starting point for a discussion.
The only problem I see here is that they – and queer & feminist theorists in general – use a language that only grad students can understand. It might be fine for academic journals, but they need to speak in standard English if they’re going to be issuing press releases.
tom k.
Of course there’s no “gay” culture in Iran; any attempt by homosexual Iranians to live openly would be met with violence and death–thus no culture can take root. And whatever culture that might exist in better circumstances would certainly be different than our own culture in the U.S., but it would still be a “gay” culture. But this is all a silly semantic game; I agree with kel777 when he says “all ‘gayness’ means is ’same sex desire’.” There are men in Iran who feel the same desire we feel toward other men. And I don’t doubt that they wish they could do that without fear of persecution and death. Same-sex desire is not a cultural construct, it is quite obviously a biological construct. The same goes for the drive toward pair-bonding, whether same sex or opposite sex. Go ask a knowledgeable primatologist about the roots of our shared human characteristics or read this book: Before Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. People are not blank slates. Those nonsense theories were tired even in the ’80s. They’re absolutely worthless now. This intellectual masturbation does nothing but dehumanize the homosexual men and women in the Arab world who are being persecuted and killed.
kel777
ds, where do I begin?
While I may jokingly refer to myself as such at times, I am not a nihilist. I do have values.
To conflate western (in particular American) imperialism with basic human rights activism is utterly absurd. Perhaps there were many ‘liberals’ who bought into the fantastic lie that the imperialist, racist war against Iraq was about ‘spreading democracy,’ but I was never fooled by the tortured mixed metaphors of idiots like Thomas Friedman (as many liberals were).
If I engage in global class activism, am I ‘imposing Western values’ on poor innocent plutocrats of other cultures?
If I challenge the sexism in Muslim cultures, am I being paternalistic? Please.
What is so different about gay activism that makes it separate from, say, class activism? Race activism? Nothing: there are homosexuals in all cultures and all races and of all classes. If there is racism in Brazil (there is) I am against it as I am against it in the USA.
It is disappointing to me that bourgeois rich yuppie academics at Columbia University don’t feel any empathy for their queer brothers and sisters in Iran. Perhaps they grew up in welcoming environments … my, how gays are spoiled these days. I will not bow to morbid, anti-sex (and hence anti-life) religions, not here, and not anywhere else.
You are perfectly correct to point out the arrogance in attempting to organize other peoples communities, but that is not the issue here. Gay Iranians and Iraqis (and everywhere else) are our community and they deserve our help, whatever we can do – even if it only amounts to just laughing their prime minister off the stage.
Qjersey
Too much post modernism turns your arguments to mush. And those arguments while new, only apply to cultures who have not been ‘exposed’ to the west…and they all were exposed long before the post modern mush starting this nonsense.
Due to increased cultural contact, particularly in the age of the Internet, if “same sex loving or fucking’ persons in a culture did not have a name for it, once they become exposed to the notion of “gay” from the west, many will identify with it and incorporate it into their self concept.
Just because the hegemony of a particular culture does not have a name for “gay” does not mean that it does not exist within that culture. Naming it means it exists and has to be dealt with.
hisurfer
I do disagree with the statement on a few levels, mostly because I think the Columbia Students are naive on how the media operates. “Gay” is a convenient term, and the media is not going to use the preferred scholarly alternative no matter how much more precise it is.
Yet I don’t see how their comments lack empathy, are spoiled, or are “evidence of western bourgeois gays who don’t give a shit.” Quite the opposite, really – they strike me as folks who think about these issues all too much. Don’t attack them for this.
ds
quick sidenote: It seems a little hypocritical for Chris Crain, the main who gave a pulpit to Jeff Gannon, to be lambasting the students’ statement.
zeami99
I work and travel all over the world. There are many kinds of male love expressed physically and most definitely “gay” is a western notion and identity. It is so thoughtlessly ascribed to everything, we can’t even fully appreciate hat sex was like between men in our own culture before ‘gay’ was the catch -all phrase for everytime men show attraction.
Using gay to describe everything and claiming everyone is gay and everyone else in history was gay, and they in denial to think otherwise is a reflection of the same global ignorance our current foreign policy has and indeed that Miss Teen America manifested so clearly: arrogant ignorance.
Paul Raposo
And what of those people who wish to live their lives as gay? By continuing this M2M meme, we will relegate non-western people who are really and truly homosexual–rather than just horny–to a physical act along with those who are just looking to get off and have no plans to grow old with a person of the same sex. It has to be called something if people want to self-identify and right now gay, or lesbian, or bi are the only words that are handy.
I think it’s arrogantly ignorant to treat non-western homosexuals as if they are just horndogs looking to fuck anything and men just happen to be handy. It perpetuates the myth that foreign people–especially non-whites–are some how lascivious compared to western people.
If the word gay doesn’t work in other places, then by going over there and letting homosexuals and lesbians and bisexuals know that they are not an anomaly, that other people like them do exist, then they will be empowered to make their own way and no doubt create their own labels if they choose.
By continually telling these people that they aren’t “really” gay when they sleep with people of the same sex, it will perpetuate the closet and the belief that it is a phase, or that they can be cured–or that homosexuals don’t exist in their land.
For proof, just look at the entire “down low” bullshit in the black community to see how much damage can be done.
earthhaiku
Let’s look at this in a different way. Do we call ancient greeks “gay” since they had what we understand as gay sex? Well, no, because the implications of those relationships were completely different from our conception of the term “gay” now. Labeling those relationships as homosexual relationships or gay relationships is putting our own lens on the situation. This is the same thing that fanatic Christians do when quoting texts from the bible–they misinterpret the texts, reading it from their own point of view, and then equate gay relationships now to supposed gay relationships of then.
If this makes sense, then it doesn’t seem so far fetched to say that in Iran, OUR IDEA of gay doesn’t exist in the same way it does for them. This isn’t to say that the notions are completely different–clearly the same-sex desire part is pretty standard in each. I think the Columbia students were simply trying to point out that the larger issue is one of sexuality, not just being gay.
eagledancer4444
For over forty years, my Mom served on the Tribal Council (the governing body) of our Tribe/“First Nationâ€. Well over a decade ago, I was driving her to one of her numerous forestry meetings. I asked her how she would translate into English the word in our language for someone who was “different.†Without hesitation, she replied, “Queer.†I thought, “My Mom is so cutting edge.â€
There are many levels of irony. I was being ironic in the sense that at the height of academic debate over Queer Studies, my Mom’s use of the English term reflected the older and pejorative meaning used by earlier generations (which, by the way, doesn’t reflect the meaning of the word in our Sahaptin language). But it was the only word in English she knew to use. On another level, I find it ironic that I cannot even write our word using the word processing program on my laptop. One of the sounds within the word exists in English only as a speech pathology. It is called a “sibilant lisp†–for example, saying the word “clay†and allowing the air to escape out the sides of the tongue as you pronounce the “cl†part. For most Americans, Sylvester the Cat and Snagglepuss of Cartoon fame are the only two who normally use this sound in English. In phonetics, the sound is written as a “barred L.†With an old fashioned typewriter, one types an â€l†and then backspaces and types a “-“ over it. Try doing that with my keyboard. Because (non-Native) linguists were forced to work with what was available, our language was set up in written form during the mid-1970’s with what could be done with a typewriter…thus many of the non-English sounds are represented by the English alphabet, but with different usage. The first three letters of our word for someone who is “different’ are “Wax†but the “W†symbol for us has a sound of someone blowing out a candle, and the “x†symbol has a “ch†throat clearing sound of Yiddish, German, and other languages that know how to really bite into a word as in “chutzpah.†“X†was chosen simply because it was so rarely used in English. Do I need to indicate how often language slippage comes about because of the Dominant Culture’s lack of options for non-Western minority groups?
And this is just about spelling.
For nearly 20 years, Native people from the United States and Canada who are “different†have annually alternated meeting on both sides of the Border. Now known as the International Two-Spirit Gathering, in 1990, participants historically troubled over the “Euro-centric†nature of the terms “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered,†voted to create a new “working term†to allow an additional way of describing someone who is “different.†Just so, Berdache is one of many terms historically used by non-Natives to describe Natives who are different; other words have been used, including hermaphrodite, transvestite, or sodomite, which are all non-Native terms. Ask an elder from many First Nations if his or her people have a “Berdache†tradition, and they most likely won’t know what you are talking about (My Mom wouldn’t). But ask about the name of someone in the Native language who is “different†(nearly 2/3s of the Native languages still spoken in North America today, have such words), and they will understand.
In the 1970’s, I remember a relative of mine who received a flyer from the Gay American Indians, an association in San Francisco. He crumpled it up and tossed it into the trash, muttering, “I may be a faggot, but I’m not gay.†While there is no question many Native people embrace the self-identities of the GBLTQ community, there is no question many do not, just as many Native peoples don’t identify with other aspects of non-Native cultures. This is why the term Two-Spirit was created.
Being told what you are to be called (Berdache/GBLTQ) is an experience of colonization. Telling other people what to call you is about self-empowerment.
Non-Native writers have been very moved by Native experiences of those who were “different.†Judy Grahn, in Another Mother Tongue (1984) states that when she saw the same type of flyer on Gay American Indians my relative threw away, she wept, knowing “that being Gay was a universal quality.â€
I don’t question that there are American Indians who self-identify as Gay, and who would be recognized as Gay by most members of this website, just as I don’t question there are Iranians who self-identify as Gay and who would be recognized as Gay by most members of this website.
That isn’t the issue at all.
Remember your “venn diagram†from your school years?—my interest is what “overlaps†western concepts and non-western traditional concepts, whether these are Native American or Iranian. The fact most American Indians identify as Democrats doesn’t mean being a Democrat was a traditional Native cultural identity. American Indians have adopted and incorporated federal concepts of political parties. But in tribal elections, candidates aren’t identified as Democrats or Republicans—these terms would be meaningless in that context. Are there Iranian Democrats and Republicans? I’m sure there are some who identify that way here in the states, but it might be a rather meaningless identity to have when in Iran. If politics are structured differently in other countries and cultures, sexual identity can be as well.
And this is avoiding gender. For a lot of other cultures (including Native American) there is often a concept of more than two genders. When you have more than two genders, the concept of homosexuality or “same-sex†gets very sloppy.
For those of you who were taught in high-school that there are only two sexes—you’re either XY or XX, that’s high-school biology. If you go further into human biology, there are at least 5 X/Y chromosome combinations, including Klinefelter’s Syndrome, where people are XXY.
And Hisurfer—if you or anyone else is still reading this lol—you can begin to understand why academics and others who start looking at a larger context, have so much difficulty at trying to sum this up simply, using English and a western “Standard Worldview.†Audre Lorde once wrote that “You cannot dismantle the Master’s house using the Master’s tools.â€
Bill Perdue
Scholars, even those prone to a showy choice of words, deserve a pat on the back for raising controversial ideas. We should go easy on them if they don’t have all the right answers.
If you crack open the history books and look at the US from the time of the Civil War, when one of us sat in the White House, until about the 1940’s and the Mattachines you’ll discover a nation with a vibrant homosexual subculture. There’s a mountain of records and photographs about homosexual life, styles, customs, slang, sexuality, and the chronic tyranny of hatemongering christians.
What you won’t find is the self aware, self confident, scientifically validated gay culture and politics of today. It developed over long decades of hard isolated struggle by thousands of steel hardened gay activists who managed to claw their way out of the closet.
Their pioneering heroism paid off when the youth radicalization of the 1960’s and 70’s spawned the victorious antiwar and feminist movements, the antiracist movements, and, towards the end, the gay and lesbian liberations movements.
I think Michael Denneny put it best in 1981 when he said ‘Homosexuality and gay are not the same thing, gay is when you decide to make an issue of it.’
There are many places where to make an issue of it gets you killed, yet even there the fight goes on, witness the night of candles in Teheran honoring their martyrs. When we interact with them we have to keep in mind the situation they’re in. And we have to respect the American revolutionaries of 1776, who fought and died to prove that foreign powers have absolutely no say in the internal politics of other nations.
eagledancer4444
This was in my inbox:
The Universe
to me
More options 1:29 am (40 minutes ago)
In all tests of character, Ty, when two viewpoints are pitted against one another, in the final analysis the thing that will strike you the most, is not who was right or wrong, strong or weak, wise or foolish…. but who would go to the greatest lengths in considering the other’s perspective.
Don’t you agree?
The Universe
fakechildhood
“It is disappointing to me that bourgeois rich yuppie academics at Columbia University don’t feel any empathy for their queer brothers and sisters in Iran.”
thats the thing. we are not all brothers and sisters.
even in the us we are not all brothers and sisters. queer people of color have entirely different struggles than white queers. the idea of us all being one big family is nice and helps us unite for certain purposes. however its sorta a lie and not always effective.
tom k.
A lot of hot air here. While same-sex attracted people are living in fear and being murdered around the world, people are arguing about the meaning of the word “gay.” This debate is hollow and completely artificial. For many people, mainly those outside the self-involved halls of academia, “gay” simply means one who is primarily attracted to members of the same sex. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they go to circuit parties, drive Jeeps or Jettas, listen to Madonna, and wear leather on occasion. So, when I say “gay,” I’m not applying my Western labels to another culture; it’s simply shorthand for “same-sex attracted person.” Obviously, for the pedantic, the semantic distinctions are all important. All this nonsense about “putting our own lens on the situation” is entirely brainless. No matter what lens you put on the situation, people are being terrorized and murdered. And if those Columbia students had any brains at all, they’d concentrate on the real issue, not play politically correct academic word games.
And a note to earthhaiku: The written records we have of ancient Greece and Rome pertain to a miniscule portion of their population, generally those people in the highest social strata. We have almost no information whatsoever about the intimate lives of the average people. Now, just imagine if, thousands of years from now, the only records of our culture pertained to New York’s wealthiest people. That would certainly give a skewed view of what our society and relationships were like.