Combahee River Collective

NICOLE FARES
Independent scholar
Alpharetta, GA

Black lesbian feminist organization formed in Boston in 1974.

The Combahee River Collective was an organization of black lesbian

feminists created in 1974 out of the Boston, Massachusetts, chapter of the
National Black Feminist Organization. Its founding members were Demita
Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith, among other African American
feminists. The name of the collective refers to an 1863 Civil War campaign
during which former slave and Union spy Harriet Tubman (c. 1820–1913)
helped free 750 slaves near the Combahee River in South Carolina (Breines
2002). The Combahee River Collective was the only black lesbian feminist
organization in the Boston area at the time of its founding and was thus at
the forefront of establishing the parameters of a new politics of black
feminism (Springer 1999).

In 1977 the organization released the Combahee River Collective

Statement, one of the most influential documents of radical black feminism
(Breines 2002). The statement articulates a strong opposition to sexism in
black liberation movements and to racism in white feminist movements in
the United States. It calls for the dismantling of interlocking sociopolitical
and economic systems of oppression, such as capitalism, patriarchy, and
racism: “We believe that sexual politics under the patriarchy is as pervasive
in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often
find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in
our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”
The statement argues that all forms of oppression are linked and cannot be
separated or prioritized. It declares an active commitment to the fight
against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and to “the
development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the
maMor systems of oppression are interlocking.” It states that the amalgam of
these oppressions creates the conditions of black women and black lesbians.
The statement articulates how marginalized women are impacted by
multiple forms of oppression and how black feminism is the sole logical
political movement for African American women to combat the multiple
and simultaneous oppressions—whether due to race, class, gender, or
sexuality—that women of color face. The Combahee River Collective
Statement represents an attempt at consciousness-raising and political
engagement in the effort to liberate all oppressed people. It is a call for
intersectional organizing across race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Oppression experienced by black women, and black lesbians in particular,

is centered in the statement, which pledges to confront homophobia.
Barbara Smith noted in 2017 that “we cannot underestimate the impact of
homophobia, specifically anti-lesbian homophobia on the history of our
organizing. We were not Must dismissed because we were black feminists.
We were dismissed because we were traitors to the race” (Gosztola 2017).
The Combahee River Collective was a socialist, nonsectarian organization
that embraced internationalism. Its members considered themselves “third
world women” who are “internally colonized” (as they claim an attachment
to third world nations and immigrants of color in the United States) and, as
such, organized in solidarity and in struggle with all third world people
(Gosztola 2017). The collective was built on a nonhierarchal distribution of
power within the group, which reflects the women's vision for a
revolutionary society.

Black Feminists and the Mainstream

Women's Movement
As one of the most influential black feminist organizations of its time, the
Combahee River Collective articulated a black lesbian, socialist, feminist
politics. Some primarily white socialist feminist organizations and issue
groups, such as the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, worked
alongside Combahee (Breines 2002). Frazier spoke of one of the reasons
behind the lack of unity among feminists at the time as a matter of conflict
in ideals and priorities: “Many of us were refugees from other political
movements—civil rights, the antiwar movement, the labor movement—
where we found ourselves in conflict with the lack of a feminist analysis
and, in many cases, we were left feeling divided against ourselves” (Frazier
1995, 12). She explains that in some of their allied feminist political groups,
they were branded as “troublemakers, brainwashed by the ‘man-hating
white feminists’” (12). As for the reason black women felt alienated in
primarily white feminist movements, she explains that white feminist
analysis did not address with enough depth issues of race and class, which
created tension and frustration among African American feminists.

Black feminists viewed the axes of gender and race as inseparable from
their experiences as black women in an inherently capitalist, sexist, and
racist American society. At the founding of the National Black Feminist
Organization in 1973, feminist, editor, and civil rights activist Margaret
Sloan (1947–2004) noted that black feminist activists “will remind the
Black liberation movement that there can't be liberation for half of a race”
(quoted in Campbell 1973). And, as later articulated in the Combahee River
Collective Statement, it was their “experience and disillusionment within
these liberation movements” as black feminists and black lesbians, “as well
as experience on the periphery of the white male left,” that led to the
establishment of the Combahee River Collective out of their need for a new
anti-racist and anti-sexist politics that addressed the needs and realities of
African American women at the time.

During the 1970s, Boston was going through a busing crisis, during which
black students were transported by bus to white schools and white students
to black schools under court order in an effort to redress segregated
education. Racial tension was high, and the African American population
found itself in a threatening and frightening environment (Breines 2002).
The members of the Combahee River Collective, who founded a local
battered women's shelter, among other efforts to aid African American
women and children during that fraught period, found it difficult to lead and
organize black feminist and lesbian initiatives when they had no black
female role models (Guy-Sheftall 1995). That period soon saw the
publication of works by iconic black women, such as Toni Cade Bambara,
Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Shirley Chisholm, which initiated a
literary awakening of sorts among African American women and signaled
“the beginning of a clearly defined black women's liberation movement that
would have priorities different from those of white feminists, and generate
considerable debate, even hostility, within the black community” (Guy-
Sheftall 1995, 14–15). Although the Combahee River Collective built on
The Black Woman (1970), an anthology edited by Bambara, and the works
of other radical black women writers, such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou
Hamer, Lorraine Hansberry, and Pauli Murray, they nonetheless remained
self-conscious of their unique position and their aloneness as they engaged
in a new kind of politics.
 © PATRICK T. FALLON/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Barbara Smith, One of the Founders of the Combahee River Collective, in 2018.
Smith was inspired by the first regional meeting of the National Black Feminist
Organization, which she attended in 1973 in New York City, and soon after met with
her twin sister Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier to form the Combahee River
Collective. The three of them later wrote the statement that was widely circulated as an
assertion of black women's rights to participate in political struggle and their rights for
sexual visibility.

Founding Members
Although the Combahee River Collective included many members, three
African American feminists were responsible for founding the group:
Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith. Barbara Smith was inspired by
the first regional meeting of the National Black Feminist Organization,
which she attended in 1973 in New York City, and she soon after met with
her twin sister Beverly Smith and Frazier to form the Combahee River
Collective. The three women later wrote the statement that became widely
circulated as an assertion of black women's right to participate in political
struggle and their rights for sexual visibility.
Frazier is a feminist, writer, teacher, and activist who maintains that black
women are still not free, which is why it is important for black feminists in
the United States today to continue to remember and learn from the
Combahee River Collective (Taylor 2017). Beverly Smith is a health
advocate, writer, academic, and activist. She is an instructor of women's
health at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and her writings on
racism, feminism, identity politics, and women's health, such as “Face-to-
Face, Day-to-Day: Racism Consciousness Raising” (1982) and “The
Wedding” (1983), have been extensively published and taught in
universities across the United States. Barbara Smith was involved in the
Black Panther movement before forming the Combahee River Collective
and remains an essential voice in feminism today. Smith has been credited
by many for playing a significant role in building and sustaining black
feminism in the United States (see Gosztola 2017; Taylor 2017). Since the
early 1970s, she has been active as a lecturer, author, scholar, and publisher
of black feminist thought and has taught at numerous colleges and
universities. She wrote and edited many works, including several
anthologies and essays with her sister, such as “Across the Kitchen Table: A
Sister-to-Sister Dialogue” (1981). Her other writings include The Truth That
Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (1998) and Yours in
Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1984,
written with Minnie Bruce Pratt and Elly Bulkin).

While there were also bisexual and straight women in the organization, the
maMority of the founders of the Combahee River Collective were lesbians or
in the process of coming out (Breines 2002). This was because “in that era,
many heterosexual black women did not want to work with open lesbians,”
seeing how they had already risked the contempt and the marginalization of
their community by coming out as feminists (Mansbridge and Smith 2000,
32). During that era of nationalism when the black community and
heterosexual values were idealized, black lesbian feminists were excluded
and marginalized by many groups.
Intersectional Identity Politics
The Combahee River Collective was one of the first political groups to
address intersectional identity politics within their statement. Their focus on
African American women's oppression is embodied in the concept of
identity politics, and they assert in their statement that the “most profound
and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our identity.”
They also declared racial solidarity with progressive black men and did not
advocate the fractionalization that their white feminist counterparts
demanded. The women of the collective believed that their situation as
African Americans necessitated a solidarity around race, which white
feminists did not need to have with white men, “unless it is their negative
solidarity as racial oppressors.” They thus claimed solidarity with black
men against racism while they struggled with black men about sexism. The
Combahee members felt alienated by, and were thus critical of, the lack of
effort among white feminist organizations to understand racism in the
mainstream feminist movement and fight against it. As they argue in their
statement, “Black, other Third World, and working women have been
involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside
reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have
served to obscure our participation.”

Mistrust of White Feminists and Black

Nationalists
Racism within the white women's liberation movement led to the
development of black feminism, by both black and white feminists alike.
According to E. Frances White, black feminists entered alliances with white
feminists assuming that a raised consciousness of women's oppression
would eventually lead to a constructive awareness of other forms of
subordinating oppressions (2001, 47). They eventually felt betrayal and
disappointment when many white feminists remained blind to class and
racial differences affecting women of color: “Racism abounds in the
writings of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the
possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial
boundaries” (hooks 2000, 3). Women of color, and especially lesbian
women of color, were excluded from mainstream feminist analyses and
practice. Thus, black feminists began to question notions of sisterhood, in
which “the sister” seemed to always be white and middle class. As a result,
early black feminists simply reMected the notion of forming coalitions with
white feminists (E. F. White 2001).

Black feminists were also mistrustful of mainstream feminism's and white

socialist feminists' employment of Black Power as a model for their own
autonomy. Women liberationists, for instance, attributed their inspiration for
political activity to the Black Power movement, which enabled them to
argue for the validity of women organizing around their own oppression
and defining the terms of their struggle (Echols 1989). According to Paula
Giddings, black feminists viewed the rise of the mainstream women's
movement, which coincided with the deterioration of the black movement,
as capitalizing on the accomplishments of the black movement: “It
appeared that the predominantly White women's movement was going to
reap the benefits that the Black movement had sown…. Comparing the
status of women to that of Blacks was particularly upsetting” (1984, 308).
Women's liberation was thus viewed by many black feminists, activists, and
scholars as not only attaching itself to the black movement but also as doing
so “with only marginal concern for Black women and Black liberation”
(Giddings 1984, 308). Thus, the Combahee and other black feminists
became wary of the women's liberation movement for what they considered
as the exploitation of Black Power.

Therefore, during the establishment of the Combahee River Collective,

African American feminists found themselves alienated and silenced:
“Those years from 1966 to 1970 during which Black Power and Women's
Liberation flowered were also the years in which the political and
philosophical weight of the black woman was either erased or divided
between black men and white women, who then proceeded to go their
separate ways pulling her apart in the process” (Wallace 1990, 170–171).
The exclusion of black feminists from the two liberationist discourses of the
period—the black nationalism and the women's liberation movements—is
conveyed in the book All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men,
but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Hull, Bell Scott, and
Smith
1982). Cowritten and coedited by one of the founding members of the
Combahee River Collective, Barbara Smith, the book states that whether
black women had gone their separate ways or whether they were excluded
from the two liberation movements, black feminists saw no other resort but
to work independently to create a safe space to develop black feminist
politics. Feeling alienated by white feminists and the black nationalism
movement and being deeply influenced by the Black Power movement but
still being marginalized by its hypermasculinity, the Combahee River
Collective developed a feminism of their own.

Enduring Influence
The collective has influenced many organizations, including, more recently,
the Black Lives Matter movement, which was mostly impacted by “the way
[the collective] talked about the importance of not Must looking at gender in
a vacuum” (Hobson and Jolna 2017, 50). Alicia Garza, one of the founders
of Black Lives Matter, explains the persistent need for the black feminism
of the Combahee River Collective in the United States today: “When we
talk about what's happening in low-income communities, often we find that
it's women—black women, women of color, and immigrant women—who
are concentrated in poverty, who [are] disproportionately impacted by
environmental racism or housing issues” (Hobson and Jolna 2017, 50). The
Combahee River Collective also focused on coalition-building, where
feminist activists and academics of different races and sexual orientation
work more comfortably with each other in the recognition of their
differences and the strength of collective power.
SEE ALSO Anti-racist Activism in Europe; Black Freedom Movement
and Sexuality; DaughtersofBilitis; Dyketactics!;
HumanRightsCampaign; Lavender Menace

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breines, Wini. “What's Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black
Women, and Feminism in the Movement Years.” Signs 27, no. 4 (2002):
1095–1133.

Campbell, Barbara. “Black Feminists Form Group Here: National Body

Hopes to End ‘Myths’ and Intimidation.” New York Times, 16 August 1973.
http://www.nytimes.com/1973/08/16/archives/black-feminists-form-group-
heree-national-body-hopes-to-end-myths.html

Combahee River Collective Statement. April 1977.

https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coaliti
on_Readings.pdf

Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–

1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Frazier, Demita. “Interview by Karen Kahn: Rethinking Identity Politics.”

SoMourner (September 1995): 12–13, 23.

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on
Race and Sex in America. New York: Morrow, 1984.

Gosztola, Kevin. “Authors of Combahee River Statement, which

Profoundly Influenced Black Feminism, Mark 40th Anniversary.”
Shadowproof, 10 July 2017. https://shadowproof.com/2017/07/10/authors-
combahee-river-statement-profoundly-influenced-black-feminism-mark-
40th-anniversary/

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, ed. Words of Fire: An Anthology of

African- American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press,
1995.

Hobson, Janell, and Karon Jolna. “Transformation of Consciousness: The

National Women's Studies Association and the Combahee River
Collective's ‘Black Feminist Statement’ Turn 40.” Ms. (Fall 2017): 48–50.
https://www.nwsa.org/files/TransformationofConsciousnessMsFall2017.pdf

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. London:
Pluto Press, 2000.

Hull, Gloria T. “History/My History.” In Changing SubMects: The Making of

Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn,
48–63. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the
Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave:
Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982.

Kolenz, Kristen A., Krista L. Benson, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. “Combahee
River Collective Statement: A Fortieth Anniversary Retrospective.”
Frontiers 38, no. 3 (2017): 164–189.

Mansbridge, Jane, and Barbara Smith. “How Did Feminism Get to Be ‘All
White’?” American Prospect 11, no. 9 (March 2000): 30–36.

Springer, Kimberly. “‘Our Politics Was Black Women’: Black Feminist

Organizations, 1968–1980.” PhD diss., Emory University, 1999.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the
Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.
Wallace, Michele. “Twenty Years Later.” In Invisibility Blues: From Pop
to
Theory, by Michele Wallace, 158–171. London: Verso, 1990.

White, Deborah Gray. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of

Themselves, 1894–1994. New York: Norton, 1999.

White, E. Frances. Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the
Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.
Coming-Out/Coming-In Discourses in the
Middle East
NICOLE FARES
Independent scholar
Alpharetta, GA

The Western pride narrative and its alternative for Middle

Eastern LGBT individuals.

Many theorists have addressed the fallout of the employment of the Western
concept of “coming out” within postcolonial societies. Queer pride, as an
epistemological stance, has dominated queer history and Western queer
discourse and identity. Not subscribing to queer pride is to be left with “the
proverbial closet of shame” (Georgis 2013b, 240), which represents a life
without freedom or without a future as a queer person. To have queer pride
is to dare to live one's life visibly; pride is, thus, a speech act. As Michel
Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality (1980), “What characterizes
modern sexuality is that it is a truth to be discovered and, once knowable to
the self, it becomes incumbent upon the self to confess it to the outside
world, even a priest or a doctor” (34). The demand to confess one's queer
sexuality or homosexuality is done both privately and publicly. It does not
suffice to come out to one's self; coming out to your family is what is
expected, then coming out to your friends, and gradually to your society.
Once you come out to yourself, you are then expected to come out to the
world. Queer pride is about sharing with others the part of your identity that
has perhaps excluded you from your community and your family; “the
ethos of pride has certainly won rights—rights I would not want to lose. But
this very ethos is now implicated in a colonial discourse that fails to see that
the right to come out and the right for legal changes are not the only
strategies for queer becoming” (Georgis 2013b, 240).

The historian George Chauncey (1994) locates the concept of coming out of
the closet in the early twentieth century, when young women would be
formally introduced into society on reaching the age of maturity. He
establishes, however, that the coming-out narrative focuses on the space left
behind as opposed to the new world that gay individuals are entering.
Chauncey also maintains that gay men in the United States, specifically in
New York, “organized cultural events that sustained and enhanced [their]
communal ties and group identity” (1994, 15) before the adoption of the
pride narrative. The coming-out model, nonetheless, is widely used today
by Western LGBT communities in their discussions of queer sexual
identities and the legal rights of their counterparts in queer communities
around the world. This renders the discourse of LGBT and human rights in
the international context very specific and opposing to alternative LGBT
discourses, such as the “coming-in” narrative, which challenges the concept
of publicly declaring and expressing one's identity as critical for the success
and advancement of global LGBT rights. “To come in” is to be gay and not
“out” to one's parents and extended conservative families; it is the choice to
selectively introduce close people into your private life and to the layers of
your identity without being met with shame and expectations from society.
In the case of the coming-in narrative, identities are not immediately
recognized, and sexual behavior and the adoption of a sexual identity
become a personal choice rather than an essential political instrument to
building a community as it is rendered by the pride narrative. In the case of
many LGBT individuals residing in the Middle East, coming in provides
them with an alternative to increased visibility as a formula for combating
homophobia, while also rendering them safe from violence and
discrimination.

Pinkwashing and the Gay International

Israel has strived since the beginning of the twenty-first century to brand
itself as a haven for LGBT individuals in the Middle East and a progressive
democratic state that is tolerant of LGBT rights. It has adopted Western
liberal queer discourses as it shames Arab states for their violent and
oppressive behaviors toward their LGBT communities. But while branding
Arabs as barbaric and backward and positioning its claims within
international human rights discourse, Israel offers no protection for or
support to Arab queers (Georgis 2013b). The term pinkwashing has thus
become synonymous with the State of Israel, as it represents itself as gay
friendly in order to play down the negative aspects of its reputation in
regard to its occupation of Palestinian land. Israel employs a queer activism
organized around visibility and coming out of the closet, and instead of
offering protection to Arab queers, the state depends on Western queer
narratives to “[marginalize] and cast as ‘premodern’ or ‘unliberated’ queer
Palestinians, and explain their supposed inability to come into
(Western/Israeli) gayness as a result of the irredeemable pathology of
Palestinian (or ‘Arab’) culture” (Ritchie 2010, 560). Jasbir K. Puar (2007)
uses the term homonationalism to refer to such positioning where a
heteronormative nation uses global gay rights to shape the views of Western
democracies, turning them against Muslim-maMority nations.

Homonationalism has thus subtly encouraged Western states to pursue wars

in order to protect and save Middle Eastern LGBT individuals from their
repressive cultures and violent states without really providing them with
sanctuary. “Liberating” gay people in the Middle East has thus grown to be
key in the discourse of neocolonialism (Georgis 2013a), which results in
highly damaging consequences for Arab queer communities. In the
Palestinian context, for instance, LGBT people are Meopardized on both
fronts, from within their own culture and from the Israeli occupation. As on
the personal level, the pride narrative imposes coming out on Arab LGBT
individuals who are not accustomed to living with LGBT identities (Georgis
2013b).
The spread of global LGBT rights has been critiqued by Arab and Western
scholars. Joseph A. Massad (2007) condemns the idea of an openly gay
identity in the Arab world, particularly with regard to the promotion of
LGBT rights. He establishes that the advancement of global gay rights in
the Middle East is but a “missionary proMect” by Western imperialist nations
through which Arabs are forced to subscribe to a heterosexual/homosexual
binary (12). These missionary proMects and the discourses and organizations
that produce and represent them are what Massad calls the “Gay
International,” which “heterosexualizes” the Arab man, for, when faced
with this binary, he is forced to choose being exclusively heterosexual
because homosexuality entails a deviation from the cultural norm (13).
Because of the Gay International, Arabs have internalized Western
Victorian attitudes toward sexuality that privilege heterosexuality and
devalue all nonnormative sexual expression or desire. Thus, while based on
a corpus of Orientalist representations of Arab masculinity and sexuality,
Western queer ideology is used to “‘liberate’ Arab and Muslim ‘gays and
lesbians’ from the oppression under which they allegedly live by
transforming them from practitioners of same-sex contact into subMects who
identify as ‘homosexual’ and ‘gay’” (162).
 © BIRMINGHAM IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Sign Protesting Treatment of Gays in Iran at a British Gay Pride Parade, 2015.
Western queer narratives organized around visibility and coming out of the closet can be
used to serve homonationalist racist agendas that position Middle Eastern nations as
backward and oppressive.

Many scholars and activists have warned against the severe repercussions
of the globalization of Western queer identity. Judith Butler, in a speech she
made declining the Civil Courage Award from Berlin Pride in 2010,
emphasized the vulnerability of gay politics and its current employment by
the West to serve homophobic ethnonationalist and homonationalist racist
agendas. The closet becomes a more subtle, postmodern power technique,
and the struggle to come out of it as citizens in a respectable queer society
protects the state from liability and frames it as a neutral authority to be
called on to amend laws and protect citizens, “rather than … [being]
invested with the power to inMure” (Brown 1995, 27). For, while coming out of
the closet represents a dream for many queer Israelis to acquire full
citizenship and motivates their activism to achieve national belonging, the
violent reality of checkpoints and the reMection of citizenship for many
queer Palestinians, along with other countless reminders of the
impossibility of belonging, shape the nature and discourse of the Israeli
state. The logic of the closet as a mechanism thus not only “allows for [a
normalized] homosexuality to be included in the national discourse … [and]
reproduces and perpetuates oppressive heteronormative practices” (Ritchie
2010, 562), it also simulates and sustains oppressive racist practices that are
indispensable to the nation's anatomy. Queer pride is limited to the right to
come out of the closet into the dominant society as respectable queer
citizens, while its potential as a radical tactic of opposition to repressive
discourses and practices has been substituted by the vocabulary of visibility,
which has become a key term in gender and sexual identity politics. It is not
shocking, therefore, that queer Arabs are reMecting certain ideologies and
practices of mainstream Western gay activism and seeking to articulate a
politics of social change that disrupts the normalization of the queer
visibility proMect (Ritchie 2010).

Alternative Discourses
Arab LGBT communities dream of a future not unlike that which has been
seen in the West: full citizenship rights, political representation, and public
visibility. Their strategies are also similar in that its members are rendering
themselves visible, not by coming out to their societies but by coming in to
friends and reaching out to LGBT communities around the world by
blogging their experiences and taking part in global feminist movements.
Such is the case with the Lebanese LGBT community, which collaborates
with feminist organizations, such as KAFA (meaning “enough” in Arabic),
in their efforts to obtain further rights and recognition. For the time being,
however, Arab LGBT people engage in what Hassan El Menyawi (2006)
calls “activism from the closet,” by which advocates can push for the
strengthening of privacy rights while also attempting to broaden the
discussion about sexual identities in the Arab world to include models that
are more relevant to the region. The activism from the closet approach does
not involve explicitly advocating for LGBT rights, but rather advocating for
issues that, while they are not categorically “gay rights” issues, will greatly
benefit LGBT people and those who participate in same-sex sexual acts.
Thus, this alternative model is a more subtle approach to gay rights
advocacy because it attempts to persuade people of issues that indirectly
advance LGBT agendas. This model most notably focuses on heightened
privacy protections, as it does not directly articulate concepts of gay rights
and LGBT identities, which would have received opposition from
mainstream Arab societies. This method of activism presents LGBT people
with a safe space as it does not involve being “out.” Thus, rather than
becoming a target for the government or other nonstate actors, “the closet,
fluid, protean and hidden, becomes a safe locus for collective strategizing—
a place from which LGBTQ groups can engage in activism” (El Menyawi
2006, 7).

Another alternative discourse to the Western coming-out narrative involves

an activism that aims to create a community based on a “common
identification with a radical democratic interpretation of the principles of
liberty and equality” (Mouffe [1993] 2005, 70) rather than to organize
around a common identification as “gays” and “lesbians.” Such a collective
strives to hold the liberal state to its democratic ideals, instead of
demanding that it accept and protect its queer citizens (Georgis 2013a). The
closet as space, and to be out of the closet, demands entry into a dominant
social space, which some Arabs reMect as a solution. The goal of such an
activism would be not to unite international LGBT communities under an
out-of-the-closet narrative that places them into a space recognized and
protected by the state, but to create a space outside of the reach of the state
and its regulations where bodies could inhabit, regardless of their
subscribed identities and sexual desires.

For the time being, Middle Eastern LGBT communities are attempting to
broaden the discussion of sexual identities and LGBT discourses to include
models that are more relevant to their regions. As framed by Dina Georgis,
must the struggle of homophobia in the Middle East “be compromised by
the racism of Western liberalism? Can we not instead contextualize present-
day homophobia in a history of colonialism that once shamed the Arab
world for being ‘too free’ in its sexual promiscuities and now shames it for
not being free enough?” (2013b, 238). Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) calls for the
reclaiming of the borders that have been set up to divide as transitional
spaces where unity can take place. Anzaldúa describes the border as an
“[open wound] where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds.
And before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds
merging to form a third country, a border culture” (3); she envisions
transforming the border into a space where transnational feminist and queer
coalitions could meet and collaborate. As a lesbian, she unites herself with
the struggle of all women and LGBT individuals internationally: “We come
from all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods” (84). She highlights
the importance of contributions made by minorities in the homosexual
community: “Colored homosexuals,” she writes, “have always been at the
forefront … of all liberation struggles …; have suffered more inMustices and
have survived them despite all odds” (85). Only by working to document
the sexualities and the experiences of LGBT people across borders living
with shame and their efforts to understand and define themselves within the
global queer discourse, will the discourses produced for collaborating with
and supporting the LGBT communities in the Middle East be beneficial and
productive for LGBT communities internationally.

The Closet; The Gay International and Mideast

SEE ALSO
LGBTQI Organizations; Pinkwashing

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
Brown, Wendy. States of InMury: Power and Freedom in Late
Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books,
1994.

El Menyawi, Hassan. “Activism from the Closet: Gay Rights Strategising in

Egypt.” Melbourne Journal of International Law 7, no. 1 (2006): 28–51.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An

Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage
Books, 1980.

Georgis, Dina. The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013a.

Georgis, Dina. “Thinking Past Pride: Queer Arab Shame in Bareed

Mista3Mil.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013b):
233–251.

Katyal, Sonia. “Exporting Identity.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 14,
no. 1 (2002): 97–176.

Massad, Joseph A. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2007.

Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. London: Verso, 2005. First
published 1993.

Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer

Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Ritchie, Jason. “How Do You Say ‘Come Out of the Closet’ in Arabic?
Queer Activism and the Politics of Visibility in Israel-Palestine.” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 4 (2010): 557–575.
Comité d'Urgence Anti-répression
Homosexuelle (CUARH)
DAN CALLWOOD
Research Associate, School of History
University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

An umbrella activist organization of gay and lesbian

groups operating in France between 1979 and 1986.

The Comité d'Urgence Anti-répression Homosexuelle (CUARH;

Emergency Committee against Homosexual Repression) was founded in
Marseille, France, in July 1979. The group was founded as an umbrella
organization to coordinate and energize the vestiges of France's gay
liberation movement with the aim of protecting gay men and lesbians
against homophobic discrimination.

By the close of the 1970s the French gay liberation movement found itself
in a weakened and fragmented state. Many of the Groupes de Libération
Homosexuelle (GLHs; Homosexual Liberation Groups) that had appeared
all over the nation since 1974 had disbanded, including the largest group,
based in Paris. Initiative and innovation were to be found outside the
capital. The GLH Marseille organized a “summer university,” bringing
together over 300 people involved in activism from France and beyond.
There, it was decided that a new organization should be created to ensure a
coordinated, national response to homosexual discrimination. The
federative CUARH was born, encompassing the remaining liberation
groups, alongside existing lesbian groups and gay Christian organizations.
Notable driving forces included the activists Jacques Fortin and Mélanie
Badaire, the Mournalists Hervé Liffran and Catherine Gonnard, the poet
Geneviève Pastre, and Jan-Paul Pouliquen, who later was a pioneer in the
area of gay civil partnership.

Early Years and Initial Successes

The CUARH was distinct from its predecessors in its move away from a
focus on sexual liberation achieved through socialist revolution. Since the
founding of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR;
Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action) in 1971, gay liberation groups
had been driven by a utopian, socialist vision of liberation rather than a
focus on pragmatic action. The CUARH, however, had more moderate
horizons, concentrating on defense and legal reform.

These aims were influenced by the sense that gay men and lesbians were
increasingly under threat from discrimination. Well-publicized incidents
included a police raid on Paris's Le Manhattan bar in 1977 and the removal
of a municipal administrator, Marc Croissant, from his Mob after he
complained to the communist newspaper L'Humanité about an article
equating homosexuality and pedophilia. Incidents such as these, amplified
to a national scale by a more confident gay media, suggested the need for
self-defense.

As a symbol of legal inequality, the age of consent was the predominant

issue in the CUARH's early years. Since 1945 the penal code had
discriminated with regard to “acts against nature,” setting different ages of
consent for heterosexual and homosexual activity: twenty-one for
homosexual acts and fifteen for heterosexual acts, the former lowered to
eighteen in 1974. To encourage reform, and support for a bill that was
bouncing between the assembly and senate, delegates from the CUARH
met members of the recently installed François Mitterrand administration in
1981. This was an early example of cooperation with state power, to which
liberation groups had previously been averse. Public demonstration was
also used by the CUARH in aid of equalization. In April 1981 the group
staged the largest march of gay men and lesbians that France had yet seen,
claiming that over 15,000 had demonstrated in support of “the rights and
freedoms of homosexuals” (Girard 1981, 5; translation by Dan Callwood).
Such actions hastened a process that was already underway and the age of
consent was equalized at fifteen in August 1982.

In its attempts to influence government policy, the CUARH began to find

its own political voice beyond its existence as an umbrella organization.
This voice was most forcefully articulated in its Mournal Homophonies. First
published in November 1980 from an initiative within the Parisian CUARH
subgroup, the Mournal's first issue declared that “through this Mournal the
CUARH wants to bring an original contribution to associations and
individuals … and effectively combat repression” (“Editorial” 1980, 1;
translation by Dan Callwood). The editorial team wanted to put the Mournal
to practical use, alerting its readers to homophobic action by the police,
government, and employers, and advising them on how to defend
themselves. By 1982 the Mournal was distributed through news kiosks
nationwide. A media outlet with national reach became the CUARH's main
political tool.

Division and Decline

From the outset, the CUARH was unusual in its coalition of gay male and
lesbian groups. Despite the group's initial energy and purpose, the CUARH
was divided, however, over the issues of gender and the place of pedophilia
in the movement. These fractures, present from the group's inception,
became more pronounced as external pressure from the HIV/AIDS crisis
began to bear on the organization. Although gay liberation movements were
initially a mixed-gender phenomenon, arguments over sex and cruising and
an atmosphere generally hostile toward women had caused lesbians to split
off and form their own groups. This separatist form of organizing had
persisted throughout the 1970s until the CUARH's attempt at a mixed-
gender movement. In this aim the CUARH had some success, as its
federative structure allowed for a more flexible approach that encompassed
different interest groups. But the CUARH soon began to suffer from the
older instinct toward separatism. Frequent expressions of misogyny pushed
women away from the CUARH and into expending more energy in
nonmixed proMects, such as the Mouvement d'Information et d'Expression
des Lesbiennes (Movement for Lesbian Information and Expression),
founded in 1981, and the magazine Lesbia (1982).

The issue of pedophilia and the age of consent also divided the CUARH.
The struggle over the age of consent had sparked debate over the place of
pedophilia in the wider gay liberation movement. Some CUARH members,
including Gérard Bach-Ignasse and the Groupe de Recherche pour une
Enfance Différente (Research Group for a Different Childhood) advocated
the abolition of the age of consent entirely, calling it a “legal fiction.”
Others disagreed. At a debate on pedophilia held by the CUARH, women
on the panel questioned a child's ability to consent and the uneven power
relations inherent in an intergenerational relationship. Ultimately, claims for
the abolition, or further lowering, of the age of consent went nowhere, only
serving to reveal continuing divisions in the movement over the limits of
sexual liberation.

By the mid-1980s the CUARH was in decline as a political force, with a

dwindling number of adherent groups. The field of activism had shifted to
confront the threat of the growing HIV/AIDS crisis. Although
Homophonies often discussed the epidemic, groups combating the virus had
grown up outside the structure of the CUARH. The focus of activism had
shifted. The group slowly dissolved and eventually disappeared on the
release of the final issue of Homophonies in February 1987, after an attempt
to relaunch the title failed.

Although the CUARH was short lived and is less remembered today than
its more radical forebears, the group has an important place in the history of
French LGBT organizing. The CUARH's embrace of coalition politics, its
focus on antidiscrimination and legal reform, and its willingness to interface
with the state provided a blueprint for later struggles over civil partnership
and marriage equality.

SEE ALSO Frente de Liberación Homosexual; Friendship Societies in

Europe; Groupe du 6 Novembre: Lesbiennes Issues du Colonialisme, de
l'Esclavage et de l'Immigration; Grupo de Trabalho Homossexual and LES;
Grupo Gay da Bahia; Human Rights in Europe; Spectra ProMect; Strange
Fruit

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Broqua, Christophe. Agir pour ne pas mourir! Act Up, les homosexuels et le
sida [Taking action so as not to die! ACT UP, homosexuals, and AIDS].
Paris: Presses de la Foundation Nationale de Sciences Politiques, 2005.

“Editorial.” Homophonies, November 1980, 1.

Girard, Jacques. “La sortie du placard” [Exit from the closet].

Homophonies, March 1981.

Idier, Antoine. Les alinéas au placard: L'abrogation du délit

d'homosexualité, 1977–1982 [The clauses of the closet: The repeal of the
crime of homosexuality, 1977–1982]. Paris: Editions Cartouche, 2013.

Jackson, Julian. Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in

France from the Liberation to AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009.

Martel, Frédéric. The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since
1968. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1999.

Prearo, Massimo. Le moment politique de l'homosexualité: Mouvements,

identités et communautés en France [The political moment of
homosexuality: Movements, identities, and communities in France]. Lyon,
France: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2014.

Rousseau, Jean-Michel. “Associations.” In Dictionnaire de l'ho-mophobie,

edited by Louis-Georges Tin, 54–56. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 2003.
Communism and Queers in Europe
JANE FREELAND
Teaching Associate, Department of History
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

The treatment of LGBTQ individuals under European leftist

regimes from the late nineteenth century through the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The LGBTQI community has historically had a fraught relationship with

communism and the Left more generally. Although communist politics and
ideology, with their call to end oppression and inequalities, have long
offered queer people and social reformers the promise of change, this
rhetoric has not always matched reality. On the one hand, socialist
revolutionaries such as the Russian ambassador Aleksandra Kollontay
(1872–1952), the German politician August Bebel (1840–1913), the
German women's rights activist Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), and the Polish-
born German antiwar activist Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) forged a
platform for the inclusion of women's rights and the freedom of sexual
expression in socialist politics. Communists in Germany and even the
Soviet Union supported the pioneering advocacy of the German sexologist
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), one of the earliest advocates for gay
rights in Europe. The revolution of 1917 even brought the decriminalization
of homosexuality in Russia. On the other hand, however, European
communist regimes and politicians have used homophobia to vilify and
violently punish individuals. During the Cold War, gay men in both the
West and East were targeted and surveilled as potential subversives.
Communist movements have also upheld heteronormative and patriarchal
binaries, seeing gender nonconformity as a threat and challenge to ideals of
citizenship, loyalty, and belonging. Examining the treatment of queers
under communism and by communists reveals how anxieties surrounding
sexual dissent are often more concerned with upholding and enforcing
norms of gender performance than with sexual practice.

Queers and Communism before World War II

In the late nineteenth century, communism was gaining increasing traction
as a political movement in Europe. At this time, whereas France, Italy, and
the Netherlands had decriminalized sodomy, sex between men was illegal in
Great Britain, Portugal, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian and Russian
empires. Despite this mixed legal environment, the predominant view,
espoused by the medical and legal profession in Europe, was that
homosexuality was unnatural. The Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von
Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) espoused the prevailing view of sexologists of
his day when he argued in his landmark work Psychopathia sexualis
([1886] 1892; Sexual psychopathy) that biological sex imbued men and
women with specific traits, including heterosexuality. Accordingly, signs of
gender nonconformity, such as same-sex desiring or male effeminacy, were
defined by medical experts as abnormal and as indicators of social and
moral decay.

Against this trend, however, was the work of a Berlin-based sexologist and
committed socialist, Hirschfeld. In 1897 Hirschfeld and two colleagues
formed the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-
Humanitarian Committee) to lobby the Reichstag to amend Paragraph 175
of the German criminal code, the provision that criminalized sex between
men. In 1919 Hirschfeld cofounded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft
(Institute for Sexual Science), a private research center and medical clinic
that continued advocating for the decriminalization of homosexuality
alongside providing information on contraception and sexually transmitted
diseases and treating the latter. The center also called for women's
emancipation and for the acceptance of transgender people, even
performing the world's first sex reassignment surgery. In spite of this
important work, Hirschfeld's understanding of homosexuality is markedly
different from contemporary ones. Hirschfeld believed that homosexuals
constitute a “third sex,” biologically different from heterosexual men and
women. He argued that because homosexuals were born with this
physiological difference they should not be persecuted.

At this same time, leftist and social democratic circles in Europe were
discussing the possibilities of life under socialism, including the role of
sexuality in the future socialist society. Historian Dan Healey (2001) has
shown that two dominant schools of thought developed on this subMect.
While some subscribed to a libertarian view and believed that sexual life
should be free of the influence of church, state, and bourgeois morals,
others believed that sexuality needed to be harnessed for socialism.
Although the Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924)
belonged to this latter group, seeing sex and reproduction as a social issue
that needed regulation, German socialists supported Hirschfeld's work and
the decriminalization of sex between men. August Bebel, the leader of the
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD; Social Democratic Party of
Germany), was even one of the first signatories of Hirschfeld's petition for
decriminalization. Bebel also amended his treatise Die Frau und der
Sozialismus (1879; Woman under Socialism [1904]) to reflect Hirschfeld's
views that homosexuality was a biological condition (Healey 2001).

Hirschfeld's work and Die Frau und der Sozialismus found receptive
audiences in revolutionary Russia. Hirschfeld's institute was even visited by
Soviet representatives, including the Soviet health commissioner, Nikolai
Semashko (1874–1949), in 1923. The delegation was particularly interested
in Hirschfeld's work on the educative film Anders als die Andern (1919;
Different from the others), which centered on the persecution and blackmail
that homosexual men were subMect to in Weimar Germany (the interwar
period in Germany, between 1918 and 1933, named after the city in which
the new republic's constitution was signed). Hirschfeld himself was a
supporter of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and a “fierce enthusiast”
(Mancini 2010, 118) of the Bolsheviks, who seized control after the
revolution and established the Soviet Union. (Bolsheviks was the name for
members of a faction within the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party,
established during a party split in 1903; that faction later became the
Russian Communist Party.) This was not only because of the Soviet stance
on women's rights but also because sex between adult men over the age of
sixteen had been decriminalized in the Soviet Union through the new
criminal code introduced in 1922. Sodomy also remained decriminalized in
the revised criminal code of 1926. Significantly, these new codes were also
gender neutral.

However, in spite of the law reform and the praise that Russian
advancements found in international socialist and sex reform circles, the
belief that sexuality is a force to be channeled for the betterment of
socialism was gathering support inside Russia. In particular, following the
introduction of the first five-year plan in 1928, efforts to remake Russia and
build communism intensified, and everyone was harnessed to the task. This
meant that the ability to discuss and research queer sexuality and gender
identity was limited, as doctors who had previously examined the biological
causes of sexuality were encouraged by the regime to pursue work of more
immediate importance. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the
drive to meet the goals of the plan increased, people identified as
unproductive social outsiders, such as prostitutes, beggars, and the
homeless, were targeted for social intervention through work camps and
reeducative efforts. In 1933 homosexual men were included in these social
cleansing efforts because of the fear that homosexual cliques acted as spies,
working to reduce the morale of the workers.

The question of homosexuality and communism was also becoming more

prominent at this time because of the rise of fascism and the tension
between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. On both sides, allegations of
homosexuality were used to challenge the honor and strength of the other
system. For example, in Germany, Ernst Röhm (1887–1934), the leader of
the Nazi paramilitary group Sturmabteilung (Storm detachment), was
homosexual, a fact that the SPD exploited. Even the Kommunistische Partei
Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany), despite supporting
Hirschfeld's decriminalization campaign, eventually supported these attacks
on Röhm, using the allegations to bring the Nazis into disrepute.

However, following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, communism and

homosexuality in Germany were violently repressed. Paragraph 175 was
radically strengthened, and Hirschfeld's institute was destroyed and its
materials burned. A year later, in 1934, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
(1878–1953) recriminalized sex between men in the Soviet Union, seeing
homosexuality—and the related issue of male effeminacy—as a symbol of
Western capitalist degeneracy. Subsequently, queer men in the Soviet
Union were arrested, imprisoned, sent to the gulag (a system of labor
camps), and even executed. The fact that this law did not address lesbians or
gendernonconforming women did not mean that queer women's sexuality
was unproblematized. Instead, these women were typically dealt with by
the medical system, where they were diagnosed with “sluggishly
manifesting schizophrenia” and given treatments that included drugs,
supervision and confinement, sex reassignment surgery, and even shock
therapy (Essig 1999, 28).

While the 1930s and 1940s were a dark period in the history of queer life in
Europe, historian Dagmar Herzog (2011) has also highlighted the
opportunities that World War II (1939–1945) presented for homosexual
experimentation, with soldiers stationed for long periods in homosocial
environments. It is estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of returning
soldiers had experimented with homosexuality during the war (Evans
2010). Similarly, women's same-sex desiring remained largely hidden
during the war, often seen as the result of the lack of available men on the
home front.
The end of the war in 1945 brought significant changes for both queers and
communism. Not only did the boundaries of communism in Europe grow
and become more fixed, but a rise in sexual conservatism across the West
and East had significant consequences for queer-identifying people.

Queers and the Cold War

In the aftermath of World War II, anxieties surrounding the corruption of
male youth, already endangered through the war, politicized homosexuality
once again, with various European countries upholding consent laws that
differentiated between same-sex and heterosexual sex. In France, reforms
implemented by the French government based in Vichy during the German
occupation that increased the age of consent for homosexual sex to twenty-
one (the age of consent for heterosexual sex being eighteen) were
maintained following liberation. Similarly, while the Netherlands removed
the Nazi-era laws on homosexuality, the age of consent for male same-sex
sex remained twenty-one. Indeed, in the postwar era homosexuality in the
Netherlands was closely policed, with castration and imprisonment
common punishments. In Germany, despite removing other Nazi laws, the
Allied occupation forces (Great Britain, France, the United States, and the
Soviet Union) retained the 1935 revision of Paragraph 175. Indeed, the Nazi
version of Paragraph 175 remained on the books in West Germany after the
Cold War division of the country in 1949. In the socialist East Germany,
however, the pre-1935 version of Paragraph 175 was restored following a
1950 Court of Appeals decision. As Jennifer Evans (2010) has shown,
throughout the 1950s, not only did a Ministry of Justice commission
recommend homosexuality be decriminalized, but prosecution under
Paragraph 175 became less common. Moreover, Hirschfeld's work was
taken up by the East German psychiatrist Rudolf Klimmer (1905–1977),
who called for decriminalization on the basis of privacy and sexual choice.

At the same time, Nazi provisions surrounding male prostitution and a

higher age of consent for homosexual sex (Paragraph 175a) were
maintained in East Germany. In particular, following the workers' uprising
of 1953 and the subsequent consolidation of socialism, Paragraph 175a was
increasingly used to “criminalize all acts of homosexual incitement and
desire involving minors” (Evans 2010, 557). Homophobic rhetoric
surrounded the purging of the ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), as heteropatriarchal
sexual conservatism was implemented as a way of legitimizing and
solidifying socialist rule at a time of political turmoil.

The year 1953 also brought the death of Stalin and the ascension of Nikita
Khrushchev (1894–1971) as leader of the Soviet Union. Following
Khrushchev's “secret speech” in 1956, in which he denounced Stalinist
repression, a slow process of liberalization began in the Communist bloc.
Alongside increasing access to the oral contraceptive pill and abortion, by
the late 1960s and 1970s homosexuality in European communist regimes
was largely decriminalized. In Hungary, homosexuality was decriminalized
in 1961; in Czechoslovakia, decriminalization came in 1962; East Germany
revoked Paragraph 175 in 1968; and finally, Bulgaria legalized homosexual
sex in 1968. However, male same-sex intercourse remained criminalized in
the Soviet Union and Romania.

However, this legal reform did not necessarily equate with social
acceptance. Across the communist bloc, homosexuality continued to be
seen as a medical condition, with ongoing policing of gay men. In Hungary,
the age of consent for homosexual sex was twenty, whereas it was fourteen
for heterosexual sex. This would be equalized only in 2002. Furthermore,
despite criminalization, Hungarian police continued to surveille
homosexual men, keeping registries of their names. For many Hungarians,
homosexuality remained a “medical aberration,” and gay men were
particularly stigmatized for perceived effeminacy (Kurimay and Takács
2017, 589). In East Germany, while some social organization was tolerated
(such as the Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin [Homosexual
Interest Group Berlin], which was officially recognized in the mid-1980s),
gay men received death threats into the 1980s. One group of lesbians and
gay men was subMected to group therapy, during which they were weighed
and measured and had samples taken as doctors attempted to find a
biological cause for their homosexuality. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile,
many gay men and lesbians continued to be subMected to extreme medical
measures that masqueraded as therapy. Electroconvulsive, or shock,
therapy, sedation, hypnosis, and hard labor continued to be used to “treat”
queer-identifying people. Similar therapies to “cure” homosexuality were
also used in Czechoslovakia prior to decriminalization. Indeed, the failure
of these methods to convert queer men to heterosexuality is one of the
reasons Czechoslovak sexologists called for the decriminalization of
homosexuality in the 1950s.

As in the 1930s, homophobic rhetoric and homosexual persecution took on

greater political significance in the context of Cold War tensions. In both
communist and Western countries, homosexuality and male effeminacy
were taken as signs of potential subversion and a threat to national security.
In the United States and Canada, harsh and often pseudoscientific measures
were taken against gay and lesbian public servants. From the 1950s to the
1970s, gays and lesbians were deemed unfit for public service because of
perceived links between homosexuality and communism, in particular the
fear that homosexuals were more susceptible to blackmail and therefore
easy targets for communist spies. Gay men and lesbians were systematically
fired, with an estimated 600 federal employees dismissed, or simply denied
employment to begin with (Johnson 2004). In Canada, a homosexual
screening program was introduced in the federal public service in 1959. The
Canadian government also funded research on the construction of a
machine designed to accurately detect queer people. Meanwhile, the East
German secret police both demonized gay men and lesbians as threats to
socialism and saw them as ideal informants, able to gain the trust of both
men and women.
In spite of this persecution, queer people across communist Europe were
able to find each other. Gay rights organizing was active well before the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Indeed, throughout the 1970s and 1980s there
were more and more opportunities for queer men and women to come
together and lobby socialist regimes for the recognition and acceptance of
their existence. Since the collapse of communism in Europe gay rights have
largely continued to be recognized in law, thanks not only to ongoing
activism but also to the work of the European Union in entrenching legal
norms. However, the legacy of communism, particularly the connections
made between heterosexuality, gender conformity, and ideas of health,
morality, normalcy, stability, and security, has continued to affect queer life
in Europe. Throughout eastern Europe the transition from communism to
democracy often went hand in hand with a revival of conservative
heteropatriarchal values. This meant both a loss of the rights awarded to
women under socialism and a solidification of gender and sexual
conformity, resulting in a rise in virulent homophobia in many
postcommunist countries—in particular, Russia.

SEE ALSO Blackmail; Chechnya, Detention Camps in; Cold War and
Sexuality in Latin America; Human Rights in Europe; Lavender Scare;
Nationalism and Sexuality in Europe; Scandals in Europe; Treason
and Queerness

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Engelstein, Laura. The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for
Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1992.

Essig, Laurie. Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Evans, Jennifer. “Decriminalization, Seduction, and ‘Unnatural Desire’ in

East Germany.” Feminist Studies 36, no. 3 (2010): 553–577.
Healey, Dan. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation
of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Herzog, Dagmar. Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of

Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004.

Kinsman, Gary, and Patrizia Gentile. The Canadian War on Queers:

National Security as Sexual Regulation. Vancouver: University of British
Columbia Press, 2010.

Kurimay, Anita, and Judit Takács. “Emergence of the Hungarian

Homosexual Movement in Late Refrigerator Socialism.” Sexualities 20, no.
5–6 (2017): 585–603.

Mancini, Elena. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A
History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

McLellan, Josie. Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality

in the GDR. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

McLellan, Josie. “Glad to Be Gay behind the Wall: Gay and Lesbian
Activism in 1970s East Germany.” History Workshop Journal 74, no. 1
(2012): 105–130.

Sokolová, Véra. “State Approaches to Homosexuality and Non-

heterosexual Lives in Czechoslovakia during State Socialism.” In The
Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice,
edited by Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová, 82–108. London:
Routledge, 2014.
von Krafft-Ebing, Richard. Psychopathia sexualis [Sexual psychopathy].
Translated by Charles G. Chaddock. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1892. First
published in German in 1886.
Compton's Cafeteria Riot (1966)
KATRINA C. ROSE
Independent scholar
Moline, IL

The first collective protest action by transgender people to lead

to structural change in the ability of trans people to interact
with law and society.

New York's 1969 Stonewall riots hold a central, yet heavily mythologized,
status as the beginning of the modern LGBT rights movement. Stonewall,
however “did not start everything” (D'Emilio 2002, 148). A different form
of mythology, the “myth of isolation” (Chauncey 1994, 3), has obscured
much of the history of pre-Stonewall life. According to the myth,
entrenched societal hostility toward gays blocked formation of any
substantive gay culture, either social or political. Yet some gays and
lesbians did actively seek structural change. They did so, however, by
attempting to seem nonthreatening and by working within established social
and political systems. Nevertheless, several key instances of militant
collective resistance predate, and have been overshadowed by, the
Stonewall riots.

In 1965 discriminatory treatment against gay and transgender patrons led to

a series of sit-ins at Dewey's Lunch Counter in Philadelphia (Hall 2008;
Stein 2000). A New Year's Eve 1966 raid on the Black Cat, a gay bar in Los
Angeles, led to protests and court challenges to state authority (Los Angeles
Advocate 1968b; Faderman and Timmons 2006). On New Year's Day 1965,
San Francisco police terrorized a ball organized by the Council on Religion
and the Homosexual that was held at California Hall. With photographing
the attendees being a key goal, “police clearly intended to intimidate the
crowd rather than regulate lawful behavior” (Boyd 2003, 233–234). The
anger that the police actions triggered within the community has led some
to refer to that event as “San Francisco's Stonewall” (Carter 2004; Hughes
1989).

Most prominent, however, among the pre-Stonewall examples of collective

community resistance that historians have rediscovered is a different San
Francisco event. In the summer of 1966, transsexual women, drag queens,
and gays collectively and violently responded to police harassment at
Compton's Cafeteria in the city's Tenderloin area (Stryker 2008b).
Occurring at the intersection of civil rights movements based on gender,
sexuality, race, and economic disempowerment, the Compton's riot stands
apart as not only being the product of organized activism but also itself
producing change that benefited the societally disfavored residents of the
Tenderloin who participated (Stryker 2008a).

© ROBERT CLAY/ALAMY
Marker Commemorating the Compton's Cafeteria Riot. A marker at the location of
Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood recognizes the
transgender women and gay men who literally fought for their rights in the 1966
incident, a full three years before the Stonewall riots in New York City would usher in
the militant era of gay rights.
A Confluence of Disfavored Sexualities and
Economies
In the early 1960s there was an increase in gay political activity in San
Francisco. Aided by a favorable court ruling, owners of gay bars
successfully challenged a policerun protection racket. On the heels of this
success, drag queen José Sarria ran for a seat on the city's Board of
Supervisors, albeit unsuccessfully. However, the gay political activity in
general spurred other forms of harassment by the police. This included
forcing evidence of gay life, including a well-established drag scene, from
the waterfront to areas whose inhabitants already were at the edge of
acceptable culture. One of these was the Tenderloin, which was already
regarded as a “human dump heap” teeming with “social outcasts”
(Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society 1998, 350, 351).
Indeed, for most of the twentieth century the Tenderloin was a district
synonymous with sex work (Stryker 2008a).

In the 1960s business elites and city planners also engaged in much broader
efforts to reshape San Francisco. Gone would be an economy that revolved
around the city's port, one that had been on the decline since the end of
World War II (1939–1945). Replacing it would be an economy focused on
culture, technology, and tourism. A significant physical manifestation of
this urban vision involved the destruction of many black and working-class
neighborhoods, as well as the relocation of the residents of other
neighborhoods. Beyond its connection with sex work and other societally
undesirable activity, the Tenderloin was more generally “the last remaining
enclave of affordable housing in downtown San Francisco” (Stryker 2008a,
69; Silverman and Stryker 2005).

The incoming displaced residents themselves displaced many of the

Tenderloin's transgender sex workers. However, the effect of the population
shifts on the neighborhood went beyond its sexual minorities. In 1965
residents sought to take advantage of economic opportunities available
under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's War on Poverty. This
mobilization within the Tenderloin also led to the formation of Vanguard,
the earliest-known youth-oriented queer organization in the United States
(Stryker 2008a). A “haven for radicalism in central San Francisco”
(Meyerowitz 2002, 229) with atypical ministries and outreach, the Glide
Memorial United Methodist Church sponsored the organization (Members
of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society 1998). Its magazine, also named
Vanguard, “served as an important instrument in creating and shaping the
new political consciousness that both gave rise to and coalesced around the
riot” that would transpire in the Tenderloin (Worley 2011, 52). The
organization itself spoke to a constituency that saw its “civil liberties
imperiled by a hostile social order in which all difference from the usual in
behavior is attacked” (Stryker and Van Buskirk 1996, 49).

Vanguard held its meetings at Compton's Cafeteria, at the corner of Turk

and Taylor in the Tenderloin (Stryker 2008a). Compton's was known for
having affordable food, and the night manager was a gay man who did not
mind if the queer street youth hung out at the cafeteria. When that manager
died, however, his replacement was far less friendly to that clientele
(Worley 2011). To offset any lack of purchases by those who would gather,
management established a “service charge” during the summer of 1966 and
applied it discriminatorily. More importantly, enforcement of this new
policy came via private security guards and calls to the police (Stryker
2008a; Worley 2011).

The eventual response to the maltreatment was a picket against Compton's

by a combination of Vanguard members, Glide ministers, and members of
the city's homophile organizations (Stryker 2008a). This 18 July 1966,
action resulted in no satisfactory resolution of Vanguard's grievances
against Compton's. However, it “seem[ed] to have consolidated the youths'
sense of collective inMury” (Worley 2011, 48). Elliott Blackstone (1924–
2006), a San Francisco Police Department sergeant, attempted to ease the
tensions between management and the queer youth that had arisen from the
“service charge” implementation. His efforts were unsuccessful, setting the
stage for the riot that occurred at the cafeteria approximately a month later
(Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society 1998).

In part because the event escaped mainstream media coverage, the exact
date of the riot is not known (Luther Hillman 2011; Stryker 2008a; Hughes
1989). Even a 1972 description of it having occurred on a “hot August
night” does not correspond to contemporaneous weather reports (quoted in
Kost 2016). It is known, however, that on one night in August 1966 a call
by Compton's management to the police to remove one table full of gender-
nonconforming youths resulted in an officer grabbing one of them in an
effort to drag her away.

Not unlike the New York police who arrived at Stonewall three years later,
San Francisco's police were used to being able to treat sexual minorities
violently without resistance (Stryker 2008a). The queen whom the officer
was attempting to drag out threw her coffee in his face, triggering a barrage
of eating utensils aimed at the police. In turn, this led to a larger-scale
disturbance in and immediately outside the cafeteria. Customers turned over
tables, smashed the cafeteria's plate-glass windows, and then took their anti-
police furor into the streets. The police called for reinforcements, but the
queens fought back with weaponized deployment of purses and heels.
Eventually, the violence led to the vandalizing of a police car and the
burning of a newsstand (Stryker 2008a).

Progress Away from the Street Fighting

Following the Compton's riot, the availability of critical services to trans
women and other Tenderloin sexual minorities increased. In addition,
relations with the police eased somewhat. While these changes did occur in
the wake of the riot, Susan Stryker cautions that it is impossible to
determine conclusively that the riot sparked these developments (Kost
2016).
Much of the change that did occur emanated from the office of the Central
City Anti-Poverty Program, which opened a few months after the riot. An
accomplishment unto itself, as it was the product of organizing across lines
of both race and sexuality, the program led to greater positive interaction
between the police and trans people. Blackstone was assigned to be the
program's community relations officer (Stryker 2008a). In this capacity he
was able to interact with the trans inhabitants of the Tenderloin on much
friendlier terms than the swarms of police who engaged in the hated
practice of “sweeping” the streets of sexual minorities (Worley 2011;
Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society 1998). Perhaps most
importantly, when presented with the opportunity to educate himself on the
subMect of transsexuality he readily did so (Stryker 2008a). By 1968 San
Francisco was perceived in Los Angeles as being devoid of police
harassment, with the difference between the two being as stark as between
Amsterdam and Moscow (Los Angeles Advocate 1968a).

Blackstone became familiar with the recently published book The

Transsexual Phenomenon (1966) and met with its author, the German-born
American endocrinologist and sexologist Harry BenMamin (1885–1986),
who maintained part of his practice in San Francisco. Many Tenderloin
trans women were his patients (Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical
Society 1998; Silverman and Stryker 2005). Funding from wealthy trans
man Reed Erickson (1917–1992) via his Erickson Educational Foundation
aided BenMamin while he wrote the book. The Transsexual Phenomenon in
turn not only enhanced BenMamin's credibility but also provided a
substantive rationale for moving transition-related health care out of the
legal shadows and for universities to establish genderidentity programs.
Johns Hopkins University established the first such formal program in
1966, soon followed by the University of Minnesota and Stanford
University (Luther Hillman 2011; Meyerowitz 2002).

Concurrently, some trans activists began working with the Center for
Special Problems (CSP), a division of the city's Department of Public
Health, while others met at Glide, eventually forming Conversion Our Goal,
possibly the nation's first trans peer-support group. Less influential was the
California Advancement for Transsexuals Society. Together, however, the
groups and the individuals therein “formed an interlocking network of
transgender activists, allies, and services” (Stryker 2008a, 75). The CSP
even provided gender-appropriate identification cards for transsexuals,
greatly aiding the goal of many to find employment outside of the sex
industry (Stryker 2008a; Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical
Society 1998).

The city-connected elements of the trans-related services continue to exist,

but the grassroots organizations eventually fell apart as a result of
differences in style, the personalities of the key players, and their visions for
trans life. Aided by the Erickson Educational Foundation, the National
Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU) was more successful. The NTCU
was able to have two fulltime peer counselors, although it funneled most of
its clients on to the CSP. On par with Erickson's financial backing was the
NTCU's relationship with the ultimate symbol of establishmentarian
authority: the police. In an unusual administrative arrangement connected to
his liaison position, Blackstone actually managed the NTCU's office. There
was a limit to what any one individual or organization could accomplish,
but the tapestry created by civic, community, and outside financial forces
had made San Francisco “the unquestioned hub of the transgender
movement in the United States” (Stryker 2008a, 81).

A Recovered Moment in LGBTQ History

After 1966 the Compton's Cafeteria riot quickly became all but invisible to
critical historical analysis. A lack of mainstream coverage severely limited
the opportunities for reflective engagement with the event. When it finally
did receive mention, it came only from an aside in a 1972 column
commemorating not the riot but Compton's Cafeteria itself when it shut its
doors for good (Kost 2016). Martin Duberman noted the existence of the
riot as a potential alternative to Stonewall as ground zero for modern
activism but surmised that why Stonewall prevailed “will always be a
mystery” (1994, 4).

Three decades after the riot, Stryker began the historical recovery of the
event when she encountered a recollection thereof in a 1972 gay pride
program. She was unsure whether the recollection was even of an event that
actually had occurred. The account did contain some inaccuracies, but it
was the starting point from which she was “able to connect the location and
timing of the riot to social, political, geographical, and historical
circumstances in San Francisco in ways that the Stonewall story had never
connected gay liberation discourse to similar circumstances in New York”
(Stryker 2008b, 152). Stryker sufficiently succeeded in her goal to make the
Compton's Cafeteria riot “enter historical memory” (quoted in Kost 2016)
that, when marking pride month in 2016, President Barack Obama
mentioned it in the same breath as, and placed it on equal footing with,
Stonewall.

SEE ALSO Stonewall Riots, International Effects of

BIBLIOGRAPHY
BenMamin, Harry. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press,
1966.

Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San

Francisco to 1965. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 2004.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books,
1994.
D'Emilio, John. The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and
Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Duberman, Martin. “Stonewall: After Many a Summer Endures a Symbol;

The Making of a Myth.” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review 1, no. 3 (31 July
1994): 4.

Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual

Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians. New York: Basic Books,
2006.

Hall, Simon. “Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s.” Journal
of Contemporary History 43, no. 4 (2008): 655–672.

Hughes, Beth. “San Francisco's Own Stonewall.” San Francisco Examiner,

4 June 1989, 7.

Kost, Ryan. “The Riot That Predated Stonewall, 50 Years Later.” San
Francisco Chronicle, 25 June 2016.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-queer-riot-that-predated-
Stonewall-50-years-8323730.php

Los Angeles Advocate. “San Francisco Scene.” July 1968a, 19.

Los Angeles Advocate. “Year-Old Black Cat Case Still Has Three Lives.”
January 1968b, 1.

Luther Hillman, Betty. “‘The Most Profoundly Revolutionary Act a

Homosexual Can Engage In’: Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation
in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964–1972.” Journal of
the History of Sexuality 20, no. 1 (2011): 153–181.

Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California.

“MTF Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966–1975:
Commentary and Interview with Elliot Blackstone.” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 2 (1998): 349–372.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the

United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Stein, Marc. City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay
Philadelphia, 1945–1972. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008a.

Stryker, Susan. “Transgender History, Homonormativity, and

Disciplinarity.” Radical History Review, no. 100 (Winter 2008b): 154–157.

Stryker, Susan, and Jim Van Buskirk. Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer
Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco: Chronicle Books,
1996.

Worley, Jennifer. “‘Street Power’ and the Claiming of Public Space: San
Francisco's ‘Vanguard’ and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism.” In Captive
Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by
Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, 41–56. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.

FILMOGRAPHY

Silverman, Victor, and Susan Stryker, dirs. Screaming Queens: The Riot at
Compton's Cafeteria. Frameline, 2005. Documentary.
Confessional Manuals in Colonial Latin
America
CANDY HURTADO
PhD candidate
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

ZEB TORTORICI
Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and
Literatures
New York University

Confessional manuals as religious guides used by priests to

teach indigenous peoples the meaning of “sin” in relation to
bodily desires and lustful thoughts.

Among Catholics, confession is meant to be one of the most private,

intimate, and potent aspects of religious life. Yet, the question of how to
administer the sacrament of confession to indigenous peoples in the Spanish
colonial Americas, many of whom had been only recently converted to
Catholicism and spoke neither Spanish nor Latin, as well as to newly
arrived, largely unacculturated slaves from Africa, gave rise to many
practical problems in terms of translation and mutual comprehension.
Indeed, how to translate the fundamental concepts of heaven, hell, sin,
redemption, and, at times, even God, in ways that indigenous peoples could
understand was a far greater challenge than several early missionaries
initially imagined. In this context, confessional manuals or confessionarios
—essentially, how-to guides for priests to properly administer the
sacrament of confession to their parishioners in their own vernacular
languages—came to be viewed as important tools in the conversion of
indigenous peoples. In early modern Spain and Portugal, confessional
manuals were typically penned in Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese, and
occasionally included translations in local languages, such as Catalan,
Galician, or Basque. In colonial Latin America, however, these manuals
were most commonly bilingual, penned in both Spanish (or Latin) and some
American indigenous language (Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha,
Mixe, or Maya in New Spain, Quechua or Aymara in the Andes, or Tupi
and Guarani in and around colonial Brazil), often with one column written
in Spanish and the other in the native language.

Throughout colonial Latin America, the confessional manuals took on

particularly heightened meanings because they were envisioned by the
Catholic Church and by religious missionaries as one of the most potent
tools for converting native peoples throughout the Americas starting in the
early sixteenth century. Confessional manuals are especially interesting to
analyze in terms of what they do (and do not do) to shed light on the history
of sexuality in colonial Latin America. What is perhaps more interesting
about the genre of bilingual confessional manuals for the history of
sexuality are their attempts to identify, name, and codify different types of
sin related to sexual desire and to what the Catholic Church in early modern
Spain termed luxuria (lust), especially in relation to the sixth commandment
(“Thou shall not fornicate”). In fact, colonial confessional manuals in their
obsessive attempts to typify and subsequently eradicate the sins of lust
among native penitents paradoxically might have done Must the opposite by
spreading an explicitly Western knowledge about bodies and desires in
indigenous languages.

This entry first briefly traces the history of confession and confessional
manuals in medieval and early modern Europe. It then moves on to colonial
Latin America, describing and analyzing a few key confessional manuals
from the viceroyalties of New Spain (in what is today largely Mexico,
Central America, and the Philippines) and Peru (in what initially
encompassed most of South America with the exception of Brazil but after
1718 was made up of what is today largely Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia). It
next discusses recent theorizations of confession as well as the current state
of research on confessional manuals. Finally, it focuses on points of
convergence, mistranslation, and confessional confusion, especially as they
relate to questions of sexuality, desire, “homosexuality,” and third-gender
subMectivities (such as ritual transvestism in the Andes). These confessional
confusions were produced, in part, by the Spanish missionaries' necessarily
imperfect translations of the tenets of Catholicism—and even the very
concept of confession, which had some resonance with preexisting
indigenous rituals both in New Spain and the Andes—into many of the
native languages throughout the Americas.

Brief History of Confession and Penitential

Texts
Also known as confessionaries or penitential texts, the corpus of texts
known as confessional manuals included comprehensively written works
with detailed instructions for priests on how to administer the sacrament of
confession to their parishioners. They became popular in Europe throughout
the Middle Ages as the practice of confession became a rite of the
sacrament of reconciliation in the Catholic Church. Its inception was a
practical response from Celtic monks in Ireland in the sixth century
regarding the need of followers to confess their sins in a nonpublic forum to
receive penance and absolution. Their goal was to guide priests in auricular
confession, developing a grammar of sin, teaching confessors how to ask
questions, and educating the penitent to articulate their sins to the parish
priest. This ideal dialogue between priest and parishioner was complicated
greatly by the very colonial context of Spain and Portugal's overseas
possessions in which bilingual confessional manuals were conceived,
penned, and, for the most part, printed.

Most penitents in the medieval European world confessed their sins to a

priest irregularly, and many never at all. In an attempt to address this, in
1215 Pope Innocent III (1160–1216) convoked an ecumenical council of the
Catholic Church, known as the Fourth Lateran Council, which sought,
among other things, to change the interaction between the priest and the
congregation by requiring Catholics to confess their sins annually to
qualified priests, usually during Lent. Yet, even after the Fourth Lateran
Council, evidence suggests that the masses remained largely ignorant of the
precept that mandated yearly confession (Haliczer 1996). While the Fourth
Lateran Council institutionalized the sacrament of private confession
among Catholics, it was not until the Council of Trent (1545–1563)—called
to address the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation—that
“people were encouraged to confess frequently, even daily, and then take
Communion in an attempt to build up ‘grace’ and shorten time in
purgatory” (Harrison 2014, 8).

In the sixteenth century, with the overlapping European proMects of

colonizing the New World, the use of bilingual confessional manuals came
to be viewed by priests and missionaries as an essential tool for converting
indigenous populations to the Catholic faith and, working closely with the
Crown and subsequent viceroyalties, for fostering the general imperial
plans of Spain and Portugal. In theory, their function was to cure souls and
to help priests absolve the sins of their penitents, but the confessional
manuals also may have symbolically enforced colonial power structures,
ultimately seeking to cultivate Christian morality by translating the very
tenets of Catholicism into indigenous languages for the purposes of
catechizing native populations. The extent to which they were successful is
much debated among scholars who research and write on the history of
religion of the Iberian Atlantic world. Perhaps most importantly, the
manuals were intended not only to define, classify, and codify sin and guide
atonement but also to help extirpate beliefs and practices that the Catholic
Church deemed superstitious or idolatrous. By examining some of the
content of specific texts, we can glean some of the preoccupations of the
Catholic Church in its colonial conversion proMect that attempted, above all,
to conquer the souls of the natives (alongside the African, mixed-race, and
even European inhabitants of the Americas).

Finally, it is worth noting that as fascinating as the genre of confessional

manuals is, as historian Stephen Haliczer notes, “The fundamental problem
with all these works is that they deal with confession from the standpoint of
theologians, who wrote to instruct confessors how to carry out their
responsibilities. By the very nature of their sources … [they] can tell us
little about confessional practice and still less about the relationship
between individual confessors and their penitents” (Haliczer 1996, 6). Yet,
as opposed to confessional manuals produced in the Iberian Peninsula, the
structure of bilingual confessional manuals written in the Americas makes
them invaluable sources for researchers because it offers a window into the
missionaries' preoccupations, their tactics for evangelization, and their
particular logics of translating particular bodies, acts, and desires as sinful.
In the words of Vicente Rafael, writing on the Spanish colonial Philippines,
the priest's “drive to overpower the penitent therefore is inextricably bound
up with the desire to know of his most intimate acts and desires” (Rafael
1993, 106).

Bilingual Confessional Manuals in New

Spain
The papal bull of Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503), known as the Inter
Caetera of 1493, declared that “barbarous nations be overthrown and
brought to the faith itself,” thereby not only demarcating the geographic
right of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns over the peoples and territories
of the New World, but also entrusting these monarchies with the Christian
conversion of the natives (Davenport 1917, 61). The conquest, therefore,
came to be legally Mustified as a salvation that required natives not only to
be catechized but also to be confessed in their own languages, often by
missionaries who had dedicated many years to learning native tongues to
such an end. Realistically, however, many priests and missionaries had
familiarity with, but were far from fluent in native languages, which made
confessional manuals all the more valuable but also inherently problematic
due to the sheer number of mistranslations and misunderstandings that
could take place between priest and penitent. The royal patronage and papal
bulls of the late fifteenth century also gave the Spanish Crown Murisdiction
over the land and the right to name bishops in the New World, which
concentrated the power of the state over church matters and over the
colonies. The Cédula Magna of 1574 and subsequent decrees by King
Philip II (1527–1598) emphasized the Spanish Empire's goal to incorporate
indigenous languages in the evangelization of the native peoples of the new
continent. These policies required that indigenous parishes be led only by
those who fluently spoke the respective indigenous languages, which
resulted in the massive proliferation of translations of pastoral texts from
Latin and Spanish into native tongues.

The bilingual question-and-answer format of confessional manuals was

established during the early colonial era and remained relatively unchanged
until the end of the colonial period (Arias González and Vivas Moreno
1993). The question-and-answer structure of the confessional manuals
followed European ecclesiastical literature, and the questions themselves
touched upon each of the Ten Commandments, sometimes followed by the
seven deadly sins. Following the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church in
Latin America became a more bureaucratic, structured, and invasive
institution. Most importantly, it encouraged the use of vernacular languages
in the administration of the sacraments. In the Americas, this ultimately
promoted the use of the native languages, and so pastoral literature was
translated locally into indigenous languages at a much faster pace than
envisioned. This included “unofficial” translations of brief, instructional
literature known as cartillas. It also included catechisms, dictionaries,
grammars, and confessional manuals in sometimes extremely remote
indigenous languages, such as the Jesuit Luis de Valdivia's 1606 Doctrina
cristiana y cathecismo, con un confesionario, arte y vocabulario breves en
lengua Allentiac (Christian doctrine and catechism, with brief confessional,
dictionary, and vocabulary in the Allentiac language), which was written in
the now-extinct Allentiac language of Patagonia (a region shared by
present-day Argentina and Chile). Confessional manuals also serve, to an
extent, as a record of indigenous languages that are no longer extant, as in
the case of the Jesuit Pedro Marban's 1702 grammar and catechism in the
now-extinct Moxa language of Bolivia, Arte de la lengua moxa: con su
vocabulario, y cathecismo (Art of the Moxa language: with its vocabulary,
and catechism).

The proliferation of these manuals fostered, in more ways than one, a

system of irregular, unstructured evangelization, especially in and around
the missions where missionaries sought to be comprehensive in their
conversion efforts, but never were. At the same time, the sixteenth-century
Council of Trent specifically defended the sacrament of penance and
highlighted its importance, defining it as a core necessity and establishing
forgiveness as a God-given right to confessors, noting “that the power of
forgiving and retaining sins was communicated to the apostles and their
lawful successors, for the reconciling of the faithful who have fallen after
baptism” (Waterworth 1848, 93). The advent of the printing press in the
New World also helped produce and spread pastoral literature and allowed
it to be more readily available to missionaries in remote locations. However,
all in all, the church had an insufficient number of clergy to catechize
remote areas and their native inhabitants. As King Ferdinand II of Aragon
(1452–1516) emphasized of the indios in the Laws of Burgos of 1512–
1513, “The principal obstacle in the way of correcting their vices and
having them profit by and impressing them with the doctrine is that their
dwellings are remote from the settlements of the Spaniard” (Simpson 1960,
12).

As a genre, the confessional manuals from New Spain are a rich set of texts,
full of detail and description. Missionaries, who dedicated years or even
decades of study to attain fluency in one or more native languages, penned
the vast maMority of the confessional manuals. They often based these
writings on their own experiences catechizing and confessing native
peoples in the region. The manuals themselves appear to have seemingly
lurid interests lurking behind their structure and content, especially in
relation to the sixth commandment, “Thou shall not fornicate.” The
confessional manuals seem to indicate that the missionaries' interest in and
focus on the sins of lust increased substantially over a relatively short
period. The lengthy anonymous Confessionario para los curas de indios
(Confessional for the priests of Indians), printed in Seville, Spain, in 1585,
listed only twenty-two questions in relation to the sixth commandment. In
contrast, Juan Pérez Bocanegra's Ritual formulario (Formulary ritual),
printed in Lima, Peru, in 1631, dedicated some 231 queries to the sins of
lust (Harrison 2014). The passage of time was not the only factor in the
difference; overall, confessional manuals written in Spain and Portugal
focused far less on the vast range of the sins of lust than did their American
counterparts.

The following examples taken from Mexican and Andean confessional

manuals clearly illustrate the Catholic priests' attempts to name and codify
the sins of lust. Yet they also point to the potential for mistranslation that
always lurks behind such endeavors. The first, taken from Franciscan friar
Juan Baptista's 1599 Confessionario en lengua mexicana y castellana
(Confessional in the Mexican and Castilian language), written in both
Nahuatl and Spanish, demonstrates the intimate nature of the questions that
Nahua male and female confessants in and around central Mexico were to
be asked in relation to the sixth commandment:

Perhaps you had sex with some married woman, a single

woman, a female relative of yours, or a young, unmarried
maiden? To what degree [of consanguinity] was the female
relative, or that of your wife? Perhaps you have desired,
with determination, to Moin another woman if you could?
Perhaps you did something filthy and dirty with yourself, or
with
another man? Have you fornicated, committed adultery with,
or known a consanguineous relative of yours, or of your wife?
Perhaps you stole her virginity, corrupting some young,
unmarried maiden? Perhaps you have touched yourself with
pleasure? Have you dressed yourself or adorned yourself in
order to be desired? Did you kiss or hug some woman, touch
her breasts, lasciviously play, or force her? Do you live with
your wife, or perhaps you left her alone, or by treating her
badly you made her flee? The times that the Devil reminds you
of your filthy pleasure, perhaps you discard such thoughts with
haste, or you delay a long time in doing so, or you give in?
Have you experienced pleasure awaking from a dream that
you dreamt? Did you deceive yourself and say dishonest words
to provoke another to sin [with you]? When you Moin with your
wife, do you guard the natural order, or perhaps you Moined
with her from behind, or perhaps in that act you had other
ways [which are] dishonest and unworthy of being named
here? Perhaps you had your wife when she was with her
custom [i.e., menstruating]?

Questions for women. Perhaps some man had sex with you,
was he married or single, or was he your relative or the
relative of your husband? To what degree [of consanguinity]
is he related to you, or to your husband? Perhaps you desired
some married man, a single man, your relative, or that of your
husband, and in what degree, say it. Perhaps you shaved,
adorned yourself, or wore makeup so that men would desire
you? Perhaps you caressed another, or had yourself caressed?
Perhaps you yourself did something on your body to pleasure
yourself? Perhaps you committed the nefarious sin with
another woman? Perhaps once with anger and wrath you
denied your husband the [conMugal] debt, and did not admit
him?
 (BAPTISTA 1599, TRANSLATION BY ZEB TORTORICI)

Mestizo priest Bartolomé de Alva's slightly later 1634 Nahuatl-Spanish

Confessionario mayor, y menor en lengua Mexicana (Large and small
confessional in the Mexican language) goes even further than Baptista's
manual, more explicitly phrasing questions to native parishioners about a
litany of lustful sins including sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, incest,
witchcraft, rape, prostitution, pimping, and drunkenness. This manual, like
most, also focuses on the extirpation of idolatry, warning the natives against
it in its admonition and in the detailed questionnaire on the first
commandment. With regard to the sixth commandment, Alva—in addition
to taxonomizing the sins of lust for Spanish missionaries and Nahua
penitents alike—offers priests the following questions to guide their own
confessional encounters with Nahuatl-speaking parishioners:

Have you had concubines? Have you licentiously enMoyed

yourself? Have you given yourself over to earthly sin and lust?
Or did you have sexual relations and sin with one [woman] or
a few? Married women? Widows? Single women? Or
completely virgin maidens? Is one of them your relative or
relation or your older sister, your sisterin-law, your niece, or
your relative or offspring within the first, second, [or] third
degree [of consanguinity]? When you had sexual relations with
your relatives, were you drunk or not? Did you repeatedly
force her? Did you have sexual relations with her by means of
fear and terror? How many times did you have sexual relations
with each one of the women you mentioned? How many
married women have you had sexual relations with, and how
many times? Perhaps when you got drunk and lost your sense
you fell into the abominable sin of sodomy, having something
to do with another man? Perhaps you were responsible for
the frightful sin, unworthy of being done, of having sexual
relations with a fourlegged animal or a beast? Did you
sometimes touch your body thinking of some woman? Did you
then spill your semen, you thinking that it was Must as if you
had really had sexual relations with that person? Did you
deceive some woman? And if it is a woman, she will be asked:
did you deceive some man, putting something on your body so
that he caught some illness when you had sexual relations with
him or he had sexual relations with you? When you had sexual
relations with your wife or some other woman: was she
menstruating? Was she with her monthly periods? Answer.
Yes/no.

Here is what the women will be asked. Were you menstruating

sometime when your husband or some other man had sexual
relations with you? Did you repeatedly feel your body, thinking
of a man, and wanting him to sin with you? Did you do it to
yourself with your hands, bringing to a conclusion your lust?
When your husband was drunk: did he have sex with you where
you are a woman, or sometimes did he do the disgusting sin to
you [i.e., sodomy and likely oral sex]? Did you restrain him?
Were you responsible for dirty words with which you provoked
and excited women? When you cohabited with some woman:
did you show and reveal what was bad in front of those who
had not yet seen the sin? Did you ever pimp for someone? On
account of you, did they know themselves through sin, you
yourself provoking a woman for whom you had summoned
someone? Did you know the failings of your mother or your
father, your children and your relatives, your household
dependents, that they were cohabiting, and you did not restrain
them? When they were drunk and intoxicated in your home,
 there committing before you sins unworthy of doing: didn't you
restrain them? Did you Must look at them?

(ALVA 1999, 105–109)

While Baptista says that his indigenous penitents must “guard the natural
order,” and that acts falling outside of that order include male-female anal
sex as well as other acts that are “dishonest and unworthy of being named
here,” Baptista's questions for men oddly assume a female partner in
sodomy, whereas his questions directed to women broach the “nefarious
sin” between two females. Alva assumes that a lack of Mudgment and a loss
of the senses—here caused by drunkenness—is a precondition for two men
to engage in the “abominable sin of sodomy.” Alva, in contrast to Baptista,
asks women about their husbands having sex “where you are a woman” and
about their having “cohabited with some woman.” Alva also frames the
“frightful sin” of bestiality as the worst, for it is “unworthy of being done.”
These examples, taken from a handful of Mexican bilingual confessional
manuals, should not be seen as guides to what individual Nahua penitents
were doing in their private lives, but rather as a record of the Catholic
Church's concerns embedded in the personal and theological interests, as
well as the anxieties, of each individual author.

Recent and forthcoming research on the colonial confessional manuals and

on the administration of the sacraments sheds much light on how confession
was carried out both in practice and in theory (Alva 1999; Burkhart 1989;
Christensen 2014; Gruzinski 1989; Klor de Alva 1991; Pardo 2004; Rafael
1993; Sigal 2005, 2007). This is shown especially in the 2017 scholarly
forum on (and original translation of) the late eighteenth-century Mexican
Advertencias para los nuevos confesores (Advice and warnings for new
confessors), written by a discalced Carmelite friar and priest (see Melvin
and Sellers-García 2017, 185–256). Recent studies on the crime of priestly
solicitation of sexual favors during confession in early modern Spain
(Haliczer 1996) and in colonial Mexico do some of this work as well
(Chuchiak 2007; González MarmoleMo 2002; Tortorici 2018; Lavrin 2008).
While much research has already been conducted on the confessional
manuals from the vast reaches of New Spain—from Guatemala to
California, from the Philippines to the Yucatán Peninsula—much more still
needs to be done in many other indigenous languages.

Bilingual Confessional Manuals in the Andes

In the Andes, as in New Spain, the practice of confession also served partly
as a means of collecting information about the indigenous peoples and their
so-called superstitious practices and beliefs. Most Christian missionaries
were convinced that prior to the Incas, Andeans had been monotheistic and
had practiced confession with ychuris (native confessors); this was reported
in the instruction section, penned by Polo de Ondegardo, of one of the
earliest confession manuals in the Andes, in 1585. As a result of one of the
most important ecclesiastical province councils, the 1583 Concilio
Provincial Limense (Provincial Council of Lima), summoned by
Archbishop Toribio de MongroveMo, pastoral materials including
confessional manuals were to be created in Spanish and then translated into
the two general languages of the indigenous Quechua and Aymara. The
council subsequently published a confessional manual titled Confesionario
para los curas de Indios—con la instrucción contra sus ritos y exhortacion
para ayudar a bien morir y suma de los privilegios y forma de
impedimentos del matrimonio (Confessional for priests of Indians—with
instruction against their rites and exhortation to assist the good death and
the sum of privileges and the nature of impediments to marriage). This
confessional manual focused primarily on a more organized evangelization
of the natives that encouraged the extirpation of idolatries and the collection
of information regarding Andean religious rituals and beliefs. In 1603
Franciscan friar Luis Bolaños translated the text into the Guarani language
in colonial Paraguay. In its introduction, the confession manual of the third
ecclesiastical council known as the Concilio Limense demonstrated a more
than superficial understanding of Andean religious beliefs, expressing
concerns about the degree of conversion of indigenous peoples and how to
use confessions to gauge this and ultimately to extirpate these idolatries.
There is also special attention to the hechiceros (spell-casters or witches)
and Andean priests and the continuing influence they seemed to have in
Andean society at the time. In the resulting Quechua text, translators had to
adapt Andean concepts of religion and morality to fit their narratives, but as
they did so, as Regina Harrison has posited, these texts “retained traces of
Andean modes of thought despite the repetitious didactic lessons in
Quechua preached from the pulpits and in the plazas” (2014, 18). There are
several other texts from the Andes and even the Southern Cone, including
Andres Febrés's mid-eighteenth-century Arte de la lengua general del reyno
de Chile (Art of the general language of the kingdom of Chile).

As in New Spain, in the Andes controlling sexuality was a maMor concern of

the discourse of confessional manuals, with strongly worded condemnations
of fornication and all types of other sexual transgressions, often referred to
as “nefarious sins,” including trial marriages, adultery, bestiality, and
sodomy. The questions regarding the sixth commandment in the 1585
Confessionario para los curas de indios are extensive. While the Spanish-
language column refers to male “voluntary pollution” (i.e., masturbation),
the Quechua-language column is more forthcoming: “Do you cause your
sperm to arrive? Touching your shameful part [pencai] do you enMoy it?”
(quoted in Harrison 2014, 138). Pérez Bocanegra's 1631 Ritual formulario
is even more explicit, guiding its readers with the following Quechua-
language questions to be addressed specifically to women: “Do you touch
your genitals with your hand? Item, your hands, how many times do you
reach out to your genitals, place your [hand], until you make your sperm
[sexual fluid] come?” (quoted in Harrison 2014, 139). He similarly
interrogates male penitents: “Have you eMaculated while you were sleeping,
because you have seen some women whom you have desired when you
were awake or because you ate food that was too hot, which encouraged
you to sin because you have eaten it or drunk too much or slept too long?”
(quoted in Harrison 2014, 139). The confessional manuals are thus
concerned with sinful acts committed as well as thoughts and dreams that
rose up around the sins of lust.

The twenty-fourth sermon in the Spanish-, Quechua-, and Aymara-language

Tercero cathecismo y exposicion de la doctrina christiana por sermones
(1585; Third catechism and exposition of the Christian doctrine by
sermons) not only defines fornication and adultery as a mortal sin, but also
specifically links them to both sodomy and bestiality as the ultimate sins:
“Above all these sins is the sin that we call nefarious, vile, and sodomy,
which is to sin man with man, or with a woman in the incorrect orifice, and
above all this is sinning with beasts, with sheep and dogs or with mares,
which is a grave abomination” (quoted in Harrison 2014, 144). The author
of the manual continues, “If there are among you men who commit sodomy
sinning with other men, or with boys, or with beasts, know that for this sin
fire and brimstone fell from the sky and turned to ash the cities of Sodom
and Gomorrah” (quoted in Horswell 2005, 291).

Pérez Bocanegra in his 1631 Ritual formulario presents a series of

questions in Quechua for his penitents: “Seeing a dog intertwined, animals
one on top of the other, do you see [it] with desire?” (quoted in Harrison
2014, 139); “Have you used the vile sin with someone? Have you
committed bestiality with an animal?”; and “Whom do you enter from the
rear? With a llama, with anything, do you sin using the rear?” (quoted in
Harrison 2014, 145). Pérez Bocanegra also cautions other priests working
in the Andes to administer confession in the Quechua language:

In regard to the sins of dishonesty (because they are so

frequent) of masturbation [poluciones], sodomy, bestiality, it
is very necessary to ask them [Indigenous penitents] the
questions listed below: for men as well as for women, whatever
their civil status, and age (varying the items a little) because I
 have found from experience that there are many adults
stained with such sins that they have never confessed; some
from ignorance, others because of forgetfulness, and other
from shame, and other for whatever reason they have never
had to confess them. And because their confessors have not
asked them in any confession about those sins.

From the nature of these questions in confessional manuals from both New
Spain and the Andes, it would seem that nothing—from menstruation,
masturbation, love potions, abortion, infanticide, adulterous relationships,
and rape to incest, sodomy, and bestiality—was outside of the realm of the
confessor's interest. The invasive and all-encompassing nature of such
questions in colonial confessional manuals has led some historians to
overemphasize both priestly power and the sexualized aspect of the dialog
between confessor and confessant. This sometimes happens under the
assumption that the priest almost perfectly transcribed the confessional
manual into actual practice.

As Harrison notes in her study of Spanish-Quechua penitential texts in the

Andes between 1560 and 1650, “When confronting so many questions
asking for explicit sexual detail, we may wonder if in fact the church was
not serving to disseminate knowledge of sexual pleasure. Perhaps these acts
had never occurred among their newly converted Quechua-speaking
parishioners” (2014, 137). Similarly, Rafael in his study of Spanish-Tagalog
translation and Christian conversion in the Spanish colonial Philippines
emphasizes how “the confessor's questions tended to take on the twists and
turns of the very sins they sought to quell” (Rafael 1993, 104). This leaves
us with the central paradox of the confessional manuals: they are invaluable
historical sources, but they ultimately tell us far more about the anxieties
(and perhaps even desires) of the Catholic priests and missionaries than
they ever could about the native peoples they were supposedly about.
Finally, it is important to briefly show how the Quechua- and Aymara-
language colonial confessional manuals gesture toward otherwise largely
absent traces of Andean notions of gender prior to the arrival of the
Spaniards. We see this especially in regard to what some scholars have
called “third-gender subMects” in the Andean world. For literary studies
scholar Michael Horswell, it was in the colonial era that the church's
mission to regulate indigenous Andeans by controlling their bodies
constructed the figure of the “sodomite” out of third-gender subMects
through a discourse that became naturalized in Europe during the
Enlightenment (Horswell 2005, 236). Horswell traces the liminal third-
gender subMect rituality in the Andes to the depictions of Moche erotic
pottery, colonial chronicles, dictionaries, and the analysis of modern
ethnographies. Ultimately, he asserts, colonization resulted in the
“transculturation of indigenous gender and sexual norms,” as opposed to a
mere imposition and internalization of Christian notions of sin and morality
(237). Relying on an excerpt from Pedro Cieza de León's sixteenth-century
chronicle of the conquest of Peru that describes in some detail an Andean
religious ritual involving cross-dressing men and “homosexuality” in the
Yungas region, Horswell and others cite it as evidence of Andean third-
gender subMectivities that do not easily map onto Judeo-Christian
conceptions of gender and the body. The ritual describes the cross-dressed
guards of the Yungas temples and how they were chosen as boys to dress
and perform “as girls” from an early age. Furthermore, during festive days,
important men in the community committed sodomy with these guards
(Cieza de León 1553, 222). The excerpt also mentions that Cieza de León's
informant, the Jesuit friar Domingo de Santo Tomas, punished two of these
cross-dressed guards for their sins and spoke to them in detail about their
acts, which likely occurred during some type of confession with the friar.

Irene Silverblatt in her study on the effects of the Spanish conquest on the
place of women in Andean society reveals that, in contrast to the
traditionally subordinate role of women in the Catholic Church, Andean
women (prior to the Spanish conquest of the Americas) had significant roles
as priestesses and, thus, as keepers of Andean religiosity. For that reason,
Andean women became one of the primary targets of the campaigns to
extirpate indigenous idolatries, which led to a decidedly more constricted
and subordinate role for women in colonial society (Silverblatt 1987).
Horswell argues that this new subaltern role of women also served to even
further diminish and obliterate the role of a third gender in the colonial
Andes. In this sense, we cannot view the bilingual confessional manuals in
isolation from broader religious, political, and economic goals of the
Spanish colonial enterprise. Recent studies on Quechua-Spanish translation
and on confessional discourse in the Andes have shed light on the local
dynamics of confession—perhaps most interestingly in relation to the
traditional knotted-cord system known as the khipus as a means of
documenting memory and recording sin (Durston 2007; Harrison 2014;
Urton 2017; Charles 2007).

Confused Discourse and Mistranslation

Historically speaking, the power of confession, and of confessional
manuals, as an instrument of control—especially of the conscience—has
been overstated by scholars. Historian Henry Charles Lea in his 1867
account of the Inquisition posited that “the power of the confessional, one
of the most effective instrumentalities invented by the ingenuity of man for
enslaving the human mind, was peculiarly liable to abuse in sexual matters”
(Lea 1907, 251). Lea's language reflects centuries of Protestant propaganda
about confession, but his remark does reflect a theme that was later
theorized by Michel Foucault in the first volume of The History of
Sexuality: “One does not confess without the presence of a partner who is
not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession,
prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to Mudge, punish,
forgive, console, and reconcile” ([1978] 1990, 61). Hence, it seems that
Foucault's notion of the “confessing animal” of the West would have been a
fundamental instrument in the colonization of the consciousness in the New
World (59). This, however, was not necessarily the case.
Several historians of colonial Latin America, too, have perhaps
overemphasized the power of confession under Spanish colonialism.
Historian Serge Gruzinski, for example, has argued that confession—a
“refined tool of ideological subMection and of domination over the
individual”—in New Spain “went beyond the spiritual sphere to become a
complex enterprise of domination and control over bodies and minds, an
enterprise of ‘deterritorialization’ that alienated the individual from his
culture and his environment and imposed upon him an explanation of
sorrow and sin” (1989, 103). Other scholars make similar claims, speaking
of the “control mechanisms” bound up in the penitential discipline and
confession of native peoples in colonial Latin America (Klor de Alva 1991,
3). Yet, these same scholars complicate our understanding by
simultaneously analyzing forms of indigenous agency by and through—or
even resistance to—confession. Such formulations help us theorize the
cultural and religious significance of the sacrament of confession in
colonial contexts, but they nonetheless overdetermine confession as the
primary site of sexual encounter between colonizers and colonized.

Much to the dismay of disconcerted priests (especially if we are to believe

their reports), many indigenous people evaded questions, gave equivocal
answers, feigned contrition, and failed to fully grasp some of the intended
meanings of confession due to mutual mistranslation. Friar Alva, for one,
lamented,

You natives, even though you are cohabiting for two [or]
three years already with a woman and sinning with her every
day and every night, when the priest and confessor questions
you
about how many times you have sinned with her, you Must
reply: “Two times, three times.” And you all make the same
statement, and with this you really damage your confession.

(ALVA 1999, 46)

In his Spanish-Quechua Sermones de los misterios de nuestra Santa fe
catolica, en lengua castellana y la general del Inca (Sermons of the
mysteries of our Holy Catholic Castilian faith and the general [faith] of the
Inca), printed in Lima in 1648, Fernando de Avendaño wrote that after a
pregnant indigenous woman asserted in confession that she was a virgin, he
bemoaned, “When you hear this, how can you explain this? This is why we
are saddened, and we priests cry in our hearts, seeing that you are going to
hell, because you hide your sins in confession” (quoted in Harrison 1994,
148). Priests also reported that some “Indians” feigned ignorance of the
confessor's language, be it Spanish or a local indigenous language, in order
to avoid confession.

Ultimately, both confession and the bilingual confesñonarios upon which

they were based—theologically, conceptually, and linguistically—are
marked by profound ambivalence. In addition to the issues outlined above,
the notion of Catholic confession resonated with indigenous rituals of
expiation that existed well before the arrival of the Spaniards. In central
Mexico, the Nahuatl term that the Catholic missionaries chose to signify the
church's sacrament of confession was neyolmelahualiztli, which literally
translates to “straightening one's heart” (Burkhart 1989, 181–182). The
Catholic sacrament of confession appears to have presented Nahuas with a
unique opportunity to cure internal disruptions and all types of ills, both
moral and material, in ways that may have differed from what priests and
friars had in mind. Similarly, in the Andes, early Catholic missionaries used
the Quechua term hichuni (or ichuni/ychucuni) to mean “to confess”
(Harrison 2014, 71). The verb, however, was lexically related to the straw
grass— the ychu—that indigenous shaman-priests used to evaluate
ceremonial confessions and prescribe due ritual penalties. For all of these
reasons and more, conceptual mistranslations and hybridizations abounded
through the confessional manuals.
Confession in colonial Latin America was perhaps less an efficient tool of
domination than a “confused discourse in which priests and penitents
negotiated meaning through their different interpretations of language and
symbols” (Sigal 2005, 580). The confessional manuals' translation of the
Catholic tenets into native languages, especially in penitential texts and
sermons, required the semantic recodification of indigenous concepts,
which was always only partly successful. Writing of the Andean
confessional manuals, Harrison tells us that their very “discourse is
hampered because of lexical disparities between Quechua and Spanish
referents and augmented further because of the distinct sexual codes of each
society” (Harrison 2014, 121).

Equally important, such conceptual mistranslations persevere well into the

present through the terms and categories often used to name particular
identities—be they lesbian, gay, homosexual, trans, queer, or something
else—that coalesce partly around a politics of desire. But when Baptista
asked his Nahuatl-speaking penitents in 1599, “Perhaps you did something
filthy and dirty with yourself, or with another man?,” or when Pérez
Bocanegra asked his Quechua-speaking parishioners in 1603 “if there are
any among you who commit sodomy sinning with other men, or with boys,
or with beasts?,” were they speaking about what we call homosexuality and
bestiality, or about some other desires that remain partly illegible to us
today? Do so-called third-gender subMectivities and ritual ceremonies in
Mexico or the Andes that mediated between the masculine and the feminine
relate to sodomy, hermaphroditism, cross-dressing, transsexuality, or some
variant of transgender? Do the “pollutions” that resulted from “doing
something dirty” equate to what we think of as masturbation?

In translating particular acts and desires in the confessional manuals (and

during the act of confession itself), the Spaniards translated Judeo-Christian
religious concepts into native practices and native moral value systems. In
doing so, they attempted to dictate morality partly by reorganizing
indigenous concepts regarding what might to us, in retrospect, appear to
relate directly to gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ desires. Harrison rightly
tells us that “the interrogations of the confessional read like a modern sex
manual because of the European obsession with procreation and fulfilling
the marital debt within the sacrament of marriage” (2014, 150). Yet, the
desires of the past also complicate those of the present, calling into question
how the sins of lust mentioned in the sixth commandment have been
historically defined, named, and moralized. Moreover, these acts of naming
are inseparable from the racializing legacies of colonialism and their
attendant representations of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas,
both past and present.

SEE ALSO Conquest and Sodomy in Latin America; Florentine Codex

and Nahua Sexuality; Moche Pottery; Sins against Nature in Colonial
Latin America

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alva, Bartolomé de. A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican
Language, 1634. Edited by Barry D. Sell and John Frederick Schwaller
with Lu Ann Homza. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Arias González, Luis, and Agustín Vivas Moreno. “Los manuales de

confesión para indígenas del siglo XVI (Hacia un nuevo modelo de
formación de la conciencia)” [Confessional manuals for sixteenth-century
Indians (Toward a new model of conscience formation]. Studia Histórica:
Historia Moderna 10 (1993): 245–259.

Baptista, Juan. Confessionario en lengua mexicana y castellana: Con

muchas aduertencias muy necessarias para los Confessores [Confessional
in the Mexican and Castilian language]. Santiago Tlatilulco, Mexico:
Melchior Ocharte, 1599.

Burkhart, Louise M. The Slippery Earth: Nahua Christian Moral Dialogue

in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989.
Charles, John. “Unreliable Confessions: Khipus in the Colonial Parish.”
Americas 64, no. 1 (2007): 11–33.

Christensen, Mark Z., ed. Translated Christianities: Nahuatl and Maya

Religious Texts. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2014.

Chuchiak, John F., IV. “The Sins of the Fathers: Franciscan Friars,
Parish Priests, and the Sexual Conquest of the Yucatec Maya, 1545–
1808.” Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (2007): 69–127.

Cieza de León, Pedro de. La crónica del Perú [The chronicle of Peru].
Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1553.

Cobo Betancourt, Juan Fernando. “Colonialism in the Periphery: Spanish

Linguistic Policy in New Granada, c. 1574–1625.” Colonial Latin
American Review 23, no. 2 (2014): 118–142.

Confessionario para los curas de indios, con la instrucion contra sus ritos:
y exhortación para ayudar a bien morir y summa de sus privilegios y forma
de impedimentos del matrimonio [Confessional for the priests of Indians
with instruction against their rites: and exhortation to help achieve a good
death and a compendium of their privileges and impediments to marriage].
Lima, Peru: Antonio Ricardo, 1585.

Davenport, Frances Gardiner, ed. European Treaties Bearing on the

History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648. Washington,
DC: Carnegie Institution, 1917.

Doctrina cristiana, y catecismo para instruccion de los indios, y de las

demas personas, que han de ser enseñadas en nuestra sancta fé: con vn
confessionario, y otras cosas necessarias [Christian doctrine, and catechism
for the instruction of the Indians, and of the other persons, who are to be
taught in our holy faith: with a confessional, and other necessary things].
Lima, Peru: Antonio Ricardo, 1584.

Durston, Alan. Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in

Colonial Peru, 1550–1650. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame,
2007.

Febrés, Andres. Arte de la lengua general del reyno de Chile, con un

dialogo chileno-hispano muy curioso: que se añade la doctrina christiana,
esto es, rezo, catecismo, coplas, confesionario, y plàticas; lo mas en lengua
chilena y castellana: y por fin un vocabulario hispano-chileno, y un
calepino chileno-hispano mas copioso [Art of the general language of the
kingdom of Chile, with a very curious Chilean-Hispanic dialogue: that the
Christian doctrine is added, that is, prayer, catechism, couplets,
confessionals, and discussions; the most in the Chilean and Spanish
language: and finally a Spanish-Chilean vocabulary, and a more copious
Chilean-Latin]. Lima, Peru: Oficina en la Calle de la Encarnación, 1765.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by

Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1990. First edition published 1978.

González MarmoleMo, Jorge René. Sexo y confesión: La Iglesia y la

penitencia en los siglos XVIII y XIX en la Nueva España [Sex and
confession: The church and penance in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries in New Spain]. Mexico City: Editores Plaza y Valdés, 2002.

Gruzinski, Serge. “Individualization and Acculturation: Confession among

the Nahuas of Mexico from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century.” In
Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción
Lavrin, 96–117. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Haliczer, Stephen. Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Harrison, Regina. “The Theology of Concupiscence: Spanish-Quechua
Confessional Manuals in the Andes.” In Coded Encounters: Writing,
Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America, edited by Francisco J.
Cevallos Candau, Jeffrey A. Cole, and Nicomedes Suarez-Arauz, 135–150.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Harrison, Regina. Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru: Spanish-Quechua

Penitential Texts, 1560–1650. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.

Horswell, Michael. Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of

Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press,
2005.

Klor de Alva, Jorge. “Colonizing Souls: The Failure of the Indian

Inquisition and the Rise of Penitential Discipline.” In Cultural Encounters:
The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, edited by Mary
Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, 3–22. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991.

Lavrin, Asunción. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Lea, Henry Charles. History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian

Church. Vol. 2. 3rd edition. London: Williams and Norgate, 1907.

Marbán, Pedro. Arte de la lengua moxa: con su vocabulario, y cathecismo

[Art of the Moxa language: With its vocabulary, and catechism]. Lima,
Peru: Imprenta Real de Joseph de Contreras, 1702.

Marcos, Sylvia. “Missionary Activity in Latin America: Confession

Manuals and Indigenous Eroticism.” In Religious Transformations and
Socio-political Change: Eastern Europe and Latin America, edited by
Luther Martin, 237–253. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993.

Melvin, Karen, and Sylvia Sellers-García, eds. Imagining Histories of

Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2017.

Molina, Alonso de. Confesionario mayor en la lengua mexicana y

castellana [Large confessional in the Mexican and Spanish language].
Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1984.

Pardo, Osvaldo. The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and

Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2004.

Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian

Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993.

Sigal, Pete. “The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin:
Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society.” Hispanic American
Historical Review 85, no. 4 (2005): 555–594.

Sigal, Pete. “Queer Nahuatl: Sahagún's Faggots and Sodomites, Lesbians

and Hermaphrodites.” Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (2007): 9–34.

Silverblatt, Irene. Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in
Inca and Colonial Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Simpson, Lesley Bird. The Laws of Burgos of 1512–1513: Royal

Ordinances for the Good Government and Treatment of the Indians. San
Francisco: Howell Books, 1960.

Tortorici, Zeb. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New
Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Uricoechea, Ezequiel. Gramática, vocabulario, catecismo i confesionario

de la lengua chibcha, según antiguos manuscritos anónimos e inéditos,
aumentados i correMidos [Grammar, vocabulary, catechism, and
confessional of the Chibcha language, according to anonymous and
unpublished ancient manuscripts, augmented and corrected]. Paris: Maison
Neuvei, 1871.

Urton, Gary. Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

Valdivia, Luis de. Doctrina cristiana y cathecismo, con un

confesionario, arte y vocabulario breves en lengua Allentiac [Christian
doctrine and catechism, with brief confessional, dictionary, and
vocabulary in the Allentiac language]. Lima, Peru: Francisco del Canto,
1606.

Waterworth, J. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Ecumenical

Council of Trent. London: C. Dolman, 1848.
Conquest and Sodomy in Latin America
JONATHAN GOLDBERG
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus
Emory University, Atlanta, GA

The Spaniards' use of the charge of sodomy against the

indigenous populations of the New World as Mustification for
conquest.

A letter dated 10 July 1519 purportedly written by the Spanish conquistador

Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and addressed to Emperor Charles V opens by
recounting his movements in the royal service from Cuba to Mexico. Cortés
describes Mexico as a land of gold like “that from which Solomon is said to
have taken the gold for the temple” (1986, 29), but he maintains his
distance from the “deformed” people he finds there. He claims they practice
self-mutilation and human sacrifice and describes them as being clothed
like Moors and living in houses designed “in the Moorish fashion” (30). A
summary Mudgment is offered: “They are all sodomites and practice that
abominable sin” (37). This claim was frequently repeated: Tomás Ortiz, in
1525, like explorer Christopher Columbus before him, believed the native
population practiced cannibalism; this led him to effortlessly link
cannibalism and sodomy as if they were the same thing, writing that they
“were sodomites more than any other race” (quoted in Guerra 1971, 53).
The charge is reiterated by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557) a
year later: “The Indians eat human flesh and are sodomites” (quoted in
Guerra 1971, 55). Even the Spanish friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–
1566), defending the innocence of the native population and condemning
the greed and rapacity of the Spaniards, nonetheless acknowledged the
practice of both cannibalism and sodomy among the indigenous population,
claiming that only a minority of the population indulged in such behavior
that would warrant their extinction.

What does “sodomy” mean in these contexts? The tendency today is to

think of it as a sexual practice (as anal intercourse performed by men), but
these and similarly worded claims by Spaniards in the New World do not
describe scenes of sex between men. They are blanket condemnations of the
indigenous population, and they follow the model offered by Sodom and
Gomorrah in the Old Testament as worthy to be destroyed for sins that are
declared but never shown. Indeed, thinking of Mexico as a land like the one
Solomon mined for booty, and for the adornment of his temple, suggests
this kind of transportation of examples fueled by religious fervor and racial
stigma, as does the comparison of natives to Moors. The conquest of the
New World, after all, followed upon the conclusion of the Reconquista of
the Moors and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. “Sodomy”
does not name a set of sexual practices so much as it sexualizes differences
that Mustify conquest and annihilation: people who sacrifice other people
(men who sacrifice other men or men who practice self-mutilation) are
people who should be sacrificed. “Sodomy” is a discursive category that
attempts, through that word, to summarize all the Mustifications for
conquest. As the crime not to be named among Christians, it is not defined
by any particular acts, extending to all sexual sins that do not result in
marital procreation; as anti-Christian, it extends to acts performed by non-
Christians (or to the wrong kind of Christian) that are seen as politically
threatening. As Michel Foucault famously wrote, it is an “utterly confused
category” (1978, 101).

Projection and the Appearances of Native

Men
One primary confusion lies in the uncanny resemblance of the natives to
their conquerors. As Peter Hulme (1986) has pointed out, the claim first
made by Columbus in 1492 and repeated by others, that the natives who
needed to be exterminated (the natives, that is, who resisted conquest) were
cannibals, represents them as parodic Christians. (Christianity, after all, is
based on human sacrifice and its ritualistic repetition in the Eucharistic
eating of Christ's body and drinking of his blood.) At the very least, the
violence of the conquerors is proMected onto native violence. Also proMected
onto the natives is a version of how the male-male order that characterized
European society was organized. Cortés vied with his fellow conquistadors
in what eventually came to be known as Mexico, but he also attempted to
consolidate relations with those above him by sharing a bed with them, as
Francisco López de Gómara (c. 1511–c. 1566) reports in his life of Cortés
about his master's experiences in Cuba.

The Spanish conquistador Diego Velázquez (c. 1465–1524), alarmed when

Cortés appeared ready to attack him, was assured by Cortés that he wished
to be “his friend and servant. So they shook hands and after a long talk lay
down together in the same bed” (Gómara 1964, 13). In an important essay
published in 1990, Alan Bray argued that the charge of sodomy seized on
forms of male-male intimacy that in other contexts were the normative
ways in which men consolidated their social standing. Kings had
bedfellows.

When Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519), days before arriving at the

Pacific Ocean in 1513, killed the leader of the indigenous people in the
Panamanian village of Quarequa along with hundreds of his followers, he
chose forty of them to be fed to his dogs to punish their sodomitical
behavior. The event is described by Pietro Martire d'Anghiera (1457–1526)
in 1516: “[Balboa] found the house of this king infected with most
abominable and unnatural lechery. For he found the king's brother and
many other young men in women's apparel, smooth and effeminately
decked, which by the report of such as dwelt about him, he abused with
preposterous Venus” ([1555] 1966, 89v; translation modernized by Jonathan
Goldberg). In this passage, sodomy is first described as if it were a sexual
disease (for it “infected” these and other men). The use of the term
abominable picks up on the lexicon of condemnation to be found in biblical
and patristic contexts, while unnatural (that is, contra natura, or “against
nature”) suggests what makes sodomy the worst of sins: it is against God's
command to be fruitful and multiply. Sex that should be procreative is
supplanted by acts that are not. The use of the phrase “preposterous Venus”
indicates such a reversal of sex as enMoined upon Adam and Eve,
substituting the anus for the vagina. Under the aegis of a Venus whose
lovemaking is “backward” (the literal meaning of “preposterous”), the men
involved in these acts do not seem to be men at all. Yet even here, no
eyewitness account of sexual behavior is offered; instead, a rumor of such
activity is credited as evidence. If it is true that Balboa heard such reports, it
might testify to a division among the natives and suggest that sodomy
accusations were not Must European inventions.

It is not known what made some native men appear to be less than entirely
masculine. Perhaps some were cross-dressed, a prerogative in some native
groups, and a sign of their special status, taken as a challenge to
assumptions about gender binarism. However, similar practices could be
found in some European cultures (and Asian ones as well) where boys, for
instance, played women's roles on stage. (This practice did not occur in the
Spanish theater, where only married women were allowed to act; their
marital status supposedly guaranteed the sexual purity that might otherwise
have been in question by the mere fact of female public performance, or by
boys playing women's parts.)

The gender hierarchies of his age are evident in what Balboa saw: it is
specifically young native men who are accused of sodomy—royal siblings
and their followers who might threaten Spanish rule. Native “courts” are
mirrors of Europe. Unruly young men (like the European conquistadors) are
equated with the insubordination of female subordinates. When Balboa fed
forty sodomites to the dogs, he was also depending on the association of
sodomy with bestiality to Mustify the punishment. Las Casas insists that “the
Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage
lions who have not eaten meat for days” (1992,11). He might have seen the
dogs as extensions of Spanish rapacity rather than as cannibalistic creatures
devouring cannibalistic sodomites.

© PRIVATE COLLECTION/THE STAPLETON

COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Sixteenth-Century Engraving by Theodor de Bry Depicting Cannibalistic
Practices of the Indigenous Population of the New World. European participants in
the conquest of the New World often depicted those they subMugated as savages
engaging in cannibalism in letters and illustrations sent back to Europe. The practice of
cannibalism was often linked to the practice of sodomy in the minds of these European
observers.

A Mirroring of Conquest and Sodomy

In her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak pithily summarizes a Mustification of colonial conquest
that can be applied to the use of “sodomy” as a pretext: “White men are
saving brown women from brown men” (1988, 296). The “brown women”
in the Balboa episode are the sodomites. (Elsewhere they are men clothed in
Moorish robes or men whose bodily piercings break the carapace of the
supposedly impenetrable male body.) In Spivak's succinct formulation the
brown men and women supposedly saved by the white men are violated by
them; one form of patriarchal domination is replaced by another. Women
are pawns in the violent contentions for male power. Brown men are the
white men's rivals. The elimination of “sodomites” in the name of
normative sexual relations furthers the subordination of native men and
women to colonial rule. The supposedly good conqueror rescues the
supposedly evil and corrupted natives who need to be saved from their own
culture. Sodomy confuses these distinctions, as is evident when Bernal Díaz
(c. 1495–1584), a soldier who participated in the conquest of Mexico and
wrote an account of it, describes the relationship of Cortés to Montezuma
(1466–1520), the ruler of Tenochtitlán, the future Mexico City; their
friendship raised no suspicions because the Aztec ruler himself “was quite
free from sodomy” (1963, 225). Cortés binds himself to Montezuma by
giving him his pageboy, exclaiming, “How right I am, Lord Montezuma, to
love you as dearly as I love myself” (quoted in Díaz 1963, 250). Such love,
with the boy as go-between, is the socially acceptable form of brotherhood
that sodomy mirrors. Even when Montezuma died because of the Spaniards
he continued to affirm his love for Cortés, or so Gómara (1964) claims.
Conquest looks like what the conquistadors called “sodomy.”

Perhaps the most stunning instance of this mirroring is offered in the report
that Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1490–c. 1560)—who explored what is
today Florida, Texas, and the Gulf of Mexico—sent to Charles V, which
was published in 1542. Separated from his fellow conquistadors after the
failure of the 1527 Narváez expedition to Florida, Cabeza de Vaca
wandered the American Southwest, often assuming the shamanistic powers
and garb of the natives with whom he traded. By the time he was “rescued”
by fellow Spaniards, he had learned to condemn their treatment of natives
without ever himself fully “going native.” In his in-between state, Cabeza
de Vaca describes himself undertaking roles that sometimes are those of
native women, sometimes those of native men. At the same time as he
himself played both parts, Cabeza de Vaca condemned the “diabolical
practice” of native men who lived with “emasculated” men: “Eunuchs go
partly dressed, like women, and perform women's duties, but use the bow
and carry very heavy loads. We saw many thus mutilated. They are more
muscular and taller than other men and can lift tremendous weight” ([1961]
1983, 100). “Diabolical practice” is as close as Cabeza de Vaca comes to
saying “sodomy,” and no wonder, because the men/women he describes
occupy his own indeterminate position.

SEE ALSO Confessional Manuals in Colonial Latin America; Florentine

Codex and Nahua Sexuality; Sins against Nature in Colonial Latin America

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bray, Alan. “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in
Elizabethan England.” History Workshop Journal 29, no. 1 (1990): 1–19.

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez. Adventures in the Unknown Interior of

America. Translated by Cyclone Covey. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1983. First published 1961 by Cromwell-Collier Publishing.

Cortés, Hernán. Letters from Mexico. Translated and edited by Anthony

Pagden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.

Díaz, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Translated by J. M. Cohen.

Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1963.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction.

Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Gómara, Francisco López de. Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His
Secretary. Translated and edited by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1964.

Guerra, Francisco. The Pre-Columbian Mind. London: Seminar, 1971.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native

Caribbean,
1492–1797. London: Methuen, 1986.

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
Edited and translated by Nigel Griffin. London: Penguin, 1992.

Martire d'Anghiera, Pietro. The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West

India. Translated by Richard Eden. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms,
1966. First published 1555 by Guilhelmi Powell.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and

the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Conversion Therapy in China
HONGWEI BAO
Assistant Professor in Media Studies
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

The use of medical, psychological, and psychiatric treatment to

“convert” LGBTQ individuals to heterosexuals in China.

The practice of conversion therapy, otherwise known as reparative therapy

(niuzhuan zhiliao in Mandarin Chinese), involves the use of medical,
psychological, and psychiatric means to change LGBTQ people's sexuality
and has been insufficiently documented in Asia. Most Asian countries do
not have state legislation and professional guidelines to protect LGBTQ
rights and to regulate the practice of conversion therapy. These
inconsistencies in LGBTQ rights and public health regulation among
different countries, together with complex social, cultural, and religious
factors in each country, provide space for institutions and individuals to
practice conversion therapy legally and illegally. In India, for example,
homosexuality was still a criminal offense based on Section 377 of the
Indian penal code as part of the British colonial legacy until India's
Supreme Court struck it down in September 2018; LGBTQ people suffer
from intense stigma and discrimination and are sometimes sent to doctors
for conversion therapy (Patra 2016).

A few places in Asia have explicitly banned conversion therapy. In 2012 the
Hong Kong Psychological Society published the “Position Paper for
Psychologists Working with Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexual (LGB)
Individuals,” stating that homosexuality and bisexuality are not mental
illnesses and that there is no scientifically proven evidence to support the
attempts to change one's sexual orientation, thus making it the first
professional body in Asia to explicitly state its position on conversion
therapy. In 2016 Taiwan's Taichung City banned the practice of
conversion therapy in the city. The following year, Taiwan's Ministry of
Health and Welfare issued an amendment to the Physicians Act (Yishi fa)
banning conversion therapy (Pride Life 2017).

This entry focuses on the conversion therapy practices and the debates
surrounding them in the context of the People's Republic of China, as the
topic has received widespread national and international publicity in the
twenty-first century (Channel 4 2015). In so doing, the entry aims to
provide a picture of the challenges and opportunities that LGBTQ people
face in Asia in fighting against conversion therapy and for LGBTQ rights.
 © GREG BAKER/AFP/GETTV IMAGES
Members of the Beijing LGBT Centre Protest Conversion Therapy outside the
Haidian District Court, 2014. Xiao Tie, executive director of the BeiMing LGBT
Centre, pretends to inMect a patient with a giant mock syringe in front of the courthouse
where hearings were being held in a landmark case involving plaintiff Peng Yanhui,
who successfully sued the Chongqing Xinyu Piaoxiang Psychotherapy Centre after he
received conversion therapy there.

Overview
Homosexuality is widely considered to have been depathologized in China.
However, such “depathologization” is only partial. The third edition of the
Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (CCMD-3), published in 2001
and still in effect as of 2017, declassifies homosexuality as a mental
disorder but still includes “sexual orientation disorders,” which refer to
“psychological disorders such as unwillingness, hesitation, anxiety,
depression, and pain” resulting from one's “sexual development and sexual
orientations” (BeiMing LGBT Centre 2014, 30). Based on this, the CCMD-3
distinguishes between two types of homosexuality: “egosyntonic,” or “self-
congruous” (ziwo hexie) homosexuality (i.e., those who feel comfortable
with their sexual identity) and “egodystonic” homosexuality (i.e., those who
do not). The CCMD-3 stipulates that egosyntonic homosexuality is
considered normal and needs no treatment; however, those who feel
“anxious, depressed, conflicted” about their sexual identity and those who
“seek change of gender and sexual identity through treatment” still need
medical, psychological, and psychiatric intervention (Zhou 2009, 125;
translation by Hongwei Bao). Although this CCMD-3 article is designed to
address some mental health issues that afflict both gay and straight people,
in reality, it has often been used to provide policy Mustifications for gay
conversion therapy.

The practice of using conversion therapy on LGBT people in China has

been widely documented, including by two Queer Comrades webcast
documentaries (Wei 2010, 2012), a 2014 report from the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) and the US Agency for International
Development (USAID), a BeiMing LGBT Centre report (2015), and a British
television documentary (Wells 2015). The BeiMing LGBT Centre
documented the practice of conversion therapy by both private and public
hospitals and clinics in ten Chinese cities (Asia Catalyst 2015). In a 2005
book on homosexuality in China, one of the authors, Lu Longguang, a
neurologist from NanMing Medical University, documented case studies of
treating homosexuality by inMecting gay “patients” with apomorphine, a
drug that induces nausea (Liu and Lu 2005; Bao 2012). According to the
account, Lu advised 2,534 gay “patients” from 1987 to 1997. Among the
1,000 gay “patients” he treated with his “guided corrective psychotherapy,”
79.8 percent came to him of their own accord, and 20.2 percent were
referred by others, including by family members and relatives. Among the
82 gay men he treated and with whom he conducted a one-year follow-up
study, 13.5 percent had “overall recovered”; 13.5 percent made “significant
progress”; 39 percent made “some progress”; and 34 percent “showed no
sign of change” (Liu and Lu 2005, 277). According to a 2015 report
published by the BeiMing LGBT Centre, 116 people interviewed went
through conversion therapy, and none of them reported a change in their
sexuality; in some cases, the treatment inflicted pain and harm on
participants and had negative and longlasting effects on their physical and
psychological health.

Reasons
The medical, psychological, and psychiatric treatment of homosexuality in
China results from the deeply rooted belief that homosexuality is an illness
or a mental disorder. This idea had its origins in the translation of Western
theories of psychology and medical science in the Republican era, the
Maoist understanding of homosexuals as “hooligans” (liumang)
incompatible with socialist governmentality, and the post-Mao Chinese
intellectuals' obsession with a highly selective body of works in Western
psychology, psychiatry, and medical science. The governance of
nonheteronormative sexuality is not only an issue of public health, with its
agenda of producing modern and healthy citizens, but also a concern for the
state to establish a heteronormative, family-oriented, and conservative
moral and social order.

The practice of conversion therapy also reflects structural problems in

China's health-care system. China's ongoing “health-care reform” (yigai),
which was launched in the 1980s, is marked by the privatization and
deregulation of China's health-care system. Not every Chinese citizen is
entitled to the same medical care in the public health system, and many
must resort to private health care for sensitive issues such as gender
identity, sexual orientation, and sex change (UNDP and USAID 2014).
Increasingly, as a result of shrinking public funding, public hospitals are
required to be financially self-sufficient and even make a profit to support
themselves. The provision of psychological counseling is seen by many
hospitals and clinics as a move to generate extra income. In a country where
health-care resources are unevenly distributed, the health-care sector is
poorly regulated, and many health professionals are insufficiently trained,
the provision of conversion therapy for LGBTQ people becomes possible.
The economic incentive of conversion therapy is alluring: a treatment
course costs an average of 20,000 yuan ($3,000), and the cost usually
spirals upward as doctors encourage more sessions and repeated courses,
but without a firm promise of results (Haas 2016).

The continuing existence of conversion therapy also reflects the worrying

situation of LGBTQ psychological and mental health in China. The BeiMing
LGBT Centre's 2014 report on the mental health of LGBT people in China
found that nearly one-tenth of the 1,600 LGBT respondents had sought
conversion therapies previously; their main motivation was “gaining
acceptance from parents and relatives,” followed by “conforming to
society” and “difficulty of living as an LGBT person” (BeiMing LGBT
Centre 2014, 41). Most LGBTQ individuals seek conversion therapy
voluntarily; some are brought for treatment by their families. There are
instances of LGBTQ individuals being sent by force to mental hospitals by
their family and relatives (see the Zhumadian case below).

Methods
Hospitals and clinics typically offer LGBTQ people treatment programs
lasting two to twenty-one weeks; most of these programs involve a
combination of psychiatric evaluation, counseling, medication, and physical
therapy. Typical methods include “psychoanalysis, self-examination
(neiguan) therapy, cognitive insight therapy, problem-solving therapy,
aversion therapy, hormonal therapy, medication, hypnosis, and
electroconvulsive therapy” (BeiMing LGBT Centre 2014, 30). In the case of
physical therapy, encouragements and incentives are given in heterosexual
scenarios, while discomfort, disgust, or even pain is induced to create
negative associations with homoerotic thoughts. Individuals have reported
the use of ammonia water as an aversion stimulus, the snapping of a rubber
band against the wrist, electroshock (BeiMing LGBT Centre 2014;
XinMingbao 2015), and the inMection of apomorphine when looking at
homoerotic images (Liu and Lu 2005).

Western medical methods are usually used in the treatment. They include
prescribing antidepressants, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills; inMecting
apomorphine or collagen; and giving electroshock. A gay man described his
experience of receiving electroshock therapy in the following account:

There was a TV set in the room. He (the therapist) asked me to

sit down on a chair with some wires and needles attached.
Then he showed me some gay porn videos. He gave me a mild
shock when I felt a bit turned on. When I was aroused, he gave
me stronger shocks, which made me feel a bit dizzy. At first, I
Mumped up immediately as I got a shock; I refused to continue
and cooperate. He tried to persuade me by saying that this was
part of the therapy and I had to accept it or the therapy would
fail. “Just think how your life will be a lot easier if you get
back to being heterosexual.” He said things like this to get me
back into the chair. He added that if I really could not bear
this he could use a belt to strap me down. He said that the
shock would only last a few seconds but I needed not worry, as
there would be no real danger to my life.

(BEIJ ING LGBT CENTRE 2014, 5 6)

Traditional Chinese medicine has also been used. A 1994 article published
in the Zhongguo xinli weisheng zazhi (Journal of Chinese psychological
health) reported the use of two types of assorted herbal medicine, named
“secret semen-boosting soup” (miMing tang) and “five-herb posterity-
preserving soup” (wuzi yanzong tang) (Fang 1995). The BeiMing News
reported in 2015 the use of an herbal soup made up of ginger, dates,
astragalus, and longan (XinMingbao 2015). A 2015 Global Times article
reported on an exorcism ceremony performed by a Taoist monk:

In a 20-square-meter house located in a traditional hutong

[alleyway] in Caishikou, BeiMing's Xicheng district, a man lit
incense, prayed to Buddha and whispered some spells. He
acted like an exorcist, pushing his hands toward Chen Wei
(pseudonym) from a distance or giving him hard slaps on the
back. The so-called master claimed that Chen was possessed
by evil spirits and that dispelling the evil could rid him of his
homosexuality.

None of these methods has proven to be efficacious.

Legal Cases and Community Activism

There have been several legal cases surrounding conversion therapy in
China, two of which have been well reported nationally and internationally:
the 2014 BeiMing case and the 2017 Zhumadian case. In both instances,
China's LGBTQ community has lent support to the rights of individuals.

The 2014 BeiMing case involved Peng Yanhui, a gay activist who sued the
Chongqing Xinyu Piaoxiang Counselling Centre after he received
conversion therapy there. The BeiMing Haidian District People's Court
ordered the center to pay the plaintiff 3,500 yuan ($560) in compensation
and issue a public apology on its website (Guardian 2014). China's LGBTQ
community supported the case strongly from beginning to end, thus
bringing China's first court case surrounding conversion therapy to a
successful conclusion.
The lack of clarity on LGBTQ issues in Chinese law and the discrepancy in
health-care practices in different parts of China meant that the BeiMing case
would not be the last court case concerning conversion therapy in China. In
2015 Yu Hu, a gay man from Zhumadian, was forced into a mental hospital
by his wife and her family when he requested a divorce from her. Yu was
involuntarily kept there for nineteen days, strapped to a bed and forcefed
medicine. The Zhumadian Yicheng District People's Court ordered the
hospital to publicly apologize to Yu and pay 5,000 yuan ($735) in
compensation (BBC News 2017). PFLAG China and other LGBTQ
nongovernmental organizations rescued Yu from the hospital and took the
case to the court.

China's growing LGBTQ community organizations have played a positive

role in fighting against conversion therapy. Shenglai tongzhi (Cures that
kill), a 2010 documentary on conversion therapy made by the BeiMing
Gender Health Education Institute, has been widely used for community
and public education, as well as in the training of health professionals. The
BeiMing LGBT Centre has worked with the LGBTQ community and the
media to raise public awareness of the harm of conversion therapy and the
importance of LGBT mental health (Asia Catalyst 2015).

SEE ALSO Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

(DSM); Human Rights in Asia; Medicine, Complementary and
Alternative; Psychoanalysis in Argentina; Rape, Corrective, in Africa

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asia Catalyst. Annual Report 2015. New York: Author, 2015.

Bao, Hongwei. “On Not to Be Gay: Aversion Therapy and Transformation

of the Self in Postsocialist China.” Health, Culture, and Society 3, no. 1
(2012): 133–149.
BBC News. “Gay Chinese Man Wins Legal Battle over Forced Conversion
Therapy.” 4 July 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-40490946

BeiMing LGBT Centre. Chinese LGBT Mental Health Survey Report [in
Chinese]. BeiMing: BeiMing LGBT Centre and Institute of Psychology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2014.

Fang, Gang. Tongxinglian zai Zhongguo [Homosexuality in China].

Changchun, China: Jilin Renmin Chubanshe, 1995.

Global Times (BeiMing). “Counterfeit Cures.” 20 October 2015.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/948130.shtml

Guardian (London). “Chinese Court Rules ‘Gay Cure’ Treatments Illegal.”

19 December 2014.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/19/chinese-court-gay-
straight-conversion-clinic

Haas, BenMamin. “Gay Pride: China Activists Fight ‘Conversion Therapy.’”

ABS-CBN News, 20 September 2016. http://news.abs-
cbn.com/overseas/09/20/16/gay-pride-china-activists-fight-conversion-
therapy

Hong Kong Psychological Society. “Position Paper for Psychologists

Working with Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexual (LGB) Individuals.” 2012.
http://www.hkps.org.hk/padmin/upload/wpage1_26download2_Position%2
0Paper%20on%20LGB.pdf

Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. HIV in Asia and the

Pacific: UNAIDS Report 2013. Bangkok: Author, 2013.
http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/2013_HIV-
Asia- Pacific_en_0.pdf

Liu, Dalin, and Longguang Lu. Zhongguo tongxinglian yanMiu [Studies on

Chinese homosexuality]. BeiMing: Zhongguo Shehui Chubanshe, 2005.
Patra, Suravi. “Conversion Therapy for Homosexuality: Serious Violation
of Ethics.” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 1, no. 3 (2016): 194–195.

Pride Life. “Taiwanese Bill to Ban Gay Cure Therapy Published.” 4 January
2017. http://pridelife.com/taiwanese-bill-to-ban-gay-cure-therapy-
published/

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). “Being LGBTI in

China: A National Survey on Social Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation,
Gender Identity, and Gender Expression.” 2016.
http://www.cn.undp.org/content/china/en/home/library/democratic_governa
nce/being-lgbt-in-china.html

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and USAID (US Agency

for International Development). “Being LGBT in Asia: China Country
Report.” 2014. http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/hiv-
aids/-being-lgbt-in-asia-china-country-report.html

Wei, Xiaogang, dir. Shenglai tongzhi [Cures that kill]. BeiMing: Queer
Comrades Production, 2011. Documentary.
http://www.queercomrades.com/en/videos/queer-comrades-videos/queer-
comrades-documentaries/cures-that-kill-1/;
http://www.queercomrades.com/en/videos/queer-comrades-videos/queer-
comrades-documentaries/cures-that-kill-2/

Wei, Xiaogang, dir. Ni ruci Mianqiang [Strong]. BeiMing: Queer Comrades

Production, 2012. Documentary.
http://www.queercomrades.com/en/videos/queer-comrades-videos/queer-
comrades-documentaries/strong/

Wells, Patrick, dir. Unreported World. Series 2015, episode 9, “China's Gay
Shock Therapy.” Aired 9 October 2015, on Channel 4.
XinMingbao. “DianMi quhun zhushe: Tongxinglian zhi liao naoMu” [Electric
shock, exorcism, inMection: The farcical treatment of homosexuality].
BeiMing News, 19 October 2015.
http://www.bMnews.com.cn/inside/2015/10/19/380870.html

Zhou, Dan. Aiyue yu guixun: Zhongguo xiandaixing zhong tongxinglian

yuwang de fali xiangxiang [Pleasure and discipline: The legal imagination
of same-sex desires in Chinese modernity]. Guilin, China: Guangxi Shifan
Daxue Chubanshe, 2009.
Côte d'Ivoire
CHRISTOPHE BROQUA
Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France

A historical and contemporary look at sexual and gender

minorities in this West African nation.

Côte d'Ivoire is considered to be the country most tolerant toward sexual

and gender minorities in West and Central Africa and in French-speaking
Africa. Established as a French colony at the end of the nineteenth century,
it maintained privileged relations with France after the proclamation of its
independence in 1960. During the socalled Ivorian miracle in the 1960s and
1970s, the country experienced economic growth linked in particular to the
increase in the price of the raw materials it produced (coffee and cocoa).
Unlike neighboring countries, it was politically stable, and it became a
showcase for postcolonial Franco-African relations.

It was likely this context that gay life in Côte d'Ivoire experienced some
development, since it seemed to flourish at the beginning of the 1980s. An
article published by two sociologists in 1984, when literature on
homosexuality in Africa was practically nonexistent in French, testified to
the tranquility enMoyed by AbidMan's gay people who blended into the city:
“No specific police repression, no stigmatization by public opinion: the
homosexual fact mainly arouses curiosity” (Le Pape and Vidal 1984, 115).
According to the authors, there was no commercial establishment attended
exclusively by gays, but some places nevertheless were preferred by the
“milieu,” to use the expression in force at that time and still today. In the
next decade, more exclusively gay bars were established.
The two sociologists also witnessed an important and relatively rare
mediatization of the gay issue, concerning a drag queen who had imitated a
famous Ivorian female singer on television. Originally from Mali, Oscar
was a well-known hairdresser and a milieu figure of the time. The press
coverage of his homosexuality, if less brutal than a media case a few years
earlier that concerned lesbians, signaled the emergence in Côte d'Ivoire of a
new regime of truth about sexual orientations (Nguyen 2005).

WOUBI CHÉRI (1998; PHILIP BROOKS, LAURENT

BOCAHUT)

Woubi chéri (1998), a French-Ivorian documentary directed and

produced by Philip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut, is one of the first
films to feature the LGBT community on the African continent. It
focuses on the daily lives and struggles experienced by gay, lesbian,
and transgender people in AbidMan, Côte d'Ivoire, an urban and
cosmopolitan setting shaped by global dynamics and local traditions.
Barbara, one of the main protagonists and the president of an
organization called the Ivory Coast Transvestites Association, explains
how members of the Ivorian LGBT community both subvert and
reproduce traditional gender norms: woubis are “effeminate” boys,
sometimes transvestites, who play the role of “women” in their
relationships with men. Their “husbands” are yossis, men who can be
bisexual and married. A toussou bakari is a lesbian, and controus are
people who do not accept the nonheterosexual lifestyle. Laurent, who
is a woubi, says about his yossi, Jean-Jacques, that “he goes out with
women because he needs to have a family for the future.” “And
maybe,” says Laurent, “I'll be able to live a family life through him.”
The protagonists claim their place in a global queer community from
which they derive a sense of support and belonging while identifying
the challenges they face in a postcolonial society ridden with economic
problems, social inequalities, and neocolonial power structures. Some
cross-dressing men featured in the documentary engage in commercial
sex work.

This award-winning documentary has been featured at various film

and documentary venues around the world. It paved the way for
subsequent films and documentaries, such as Call Me Kuchu (2012)
and Born This Way (2013), that critically address both homophobia
and transphobia in various African countries, as well as some African
leaders' contention that homosexuality is “un-African.” However,
LGBT organizing on the African continent has facilitated wider
representations of same-sex desire in African literatures and cultures.
In Woubi chéri, Barbara and her friends express their need for
acceptance and the importance of carving out new spaces of difference
and inclusion in African societies, while celebrating same-sex
relationships as legitimate modes of pleasure and commitment. Their
quest for identity can also be seen as representative of contemporary
African societies' own quest for self-definition at the Munction of
indigenous sociocultural heritages and the often dehumanizing impact
of Western influences. Tatiana, who is a transvestite, states, “Without
the right to be different, Africa is going nowhere.” Barbara declares,
“You have to be creative, live life like an artist. You can't always be
down-toearth. Tradition is fine but you have to be in-between. I think
that's what the third millennium will be all about … a mix of modern
and traditional, different ways of life and sex.” The documentary ends
with a dMémé, a type of traditional feast, in Bingerville, a suburb of
AbidMan. Dressed in beautiful boubous, woubis are shown dancing for
a varied community of families, couples, and children who have
gathered to partake in the festivities: a community made of many
differences but also of renewed social interactions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Born This Way. Directed by Shaun Kadlec and Deb Tullmann. Los
Angeles: Good Docs, 2013. DVD.

Call Me Kuchu. Directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika

Zouhali-Worrall. Los Angeles: Docurama, 2012. DVD.

Woubi Chéri. Directed by Philip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut. San

Francisco: California Newsreel, 1998. DVD.

Thérèse Migraine-George
Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
University of Cincinnati

The bipolarization of sexual identities was then a salient fact in the milieu
and in same-sex couples. Among men, the woubi are the “feminine”
partners, while the yossi are the partners who conform to the dominant
norms of masculinity.

In AbidMan during the 1990s, and no doubt before, there were many
“transvestites” (in French travestis, i.e., drag queens), whose leader was
Barbara (Brooks and Bocahut 1998). The division between woubi and yossi
still exists today, and there is still a significant presence of transvestites, as
evidenced, for example, by the regular “Miss Woubi” contest. But while
dual-gender identifications among both gay men and lesbians have
remained for decades, sexual identities also evolved over time. This has
been the case particularly among men since the first decade of the twenty-
first century, with the use of internet dating sites and the internationalized
categories that these sites popularize referring more to position in the sexual
relationship (top/bottom) than to gender role (Broqua 2013).
Another evolution of this period concerned gay politics in a global African
context that was becoming increasingly hostile. An organization (not
officially registered) of transvestites in Côte d'Ivoire was created in the
1990s, but it was within the framework of the fight against AIDS that gay
mobilizations appeared during the first decade of the twenty-first century,
even if some gays were already engaged before then. Indeed, one of the
main organizations fighting AIDS in Côte d'Ivoire was created in the 1990s
by gay men who saw their relatives fall ill or die (Nguyen 2005), as was the
case with the early organizations in some North American and European
countries. But it was in 2003, a few years after the country entered a cycle
of repeated political crises and wars, that the first officially recognized gay
organization to fight AIDS, Arc-En-Ciel Plus, was created, although the
registered statutes were initially discreet on its gay dimension. It was one of
the first of its kind in French-speaking Africa, where the gay movement was
almost everywhere initiated as part of the fight against AIDS. Following a
split within Arc-En-Ciel Plus, another organization was created in 2010,
Alternative Côte d'Ivoire, which enMoyed greater success and developed
rapidly while increasing international attention was being paid to “key
populations” in the fight against AIDS in Africa, including men who have
sex with men (but do not necessarily identify as gay). Because this
mobilization was linked to AIDS, it mainly concerned men, but lesbians
also were important in the development of same-sex social forms during the
first and second decades of the twentyfirst century, when they played a
predominant role in the organization of the system of gay and lesbian bars.

At the same time that gay mobilization was on the upswing, controversies
and violence of unprecedented scale broke out during the first half of 2010
(Broqua 2015). There had long been violence against transvestites,
particularly prostitutes (Thomann and Corey-Boulet 2017), but beginning in
2013 violence spread to other targets. In the wake of publicity surrounding
the French embassy's grant funding to Alternative Côte d'Ivoire and the
signing of an agreement between the two, there was an extraordinary public
backlash against homosexuality. To counter rumors, President Alassane
Ouattara himself had to publicly state that same-sex marriage would not be
legalized. In 2014 the controversy redoubled when Alternative Côte d'Ivoire
and a gay bar were violently attacked in an incident mingled with
anticolonialist sentiment; because France had Must legalized same-sex
marriage the year before, protesters believed the former colonial power
would attempt to impose its sexual norms on Côte d'Ivoire.

During the second half of 2010, as the situation calmed down, there was a
proliferation of specialized organizations for lesbians, trans and intersex
individuals, gay drug users, and other sexual and gender minorities. There
is competition among these organizations over the content of their
mobilizations (i.e., their target groups) and funding, which, stemming from
the fight against AIDS, is given mainly to senior organizations. One of the
main issues the movement faces concerns the link between the fight against
AIDS, which draws most of the funding, and the defense of sexual and
gender minorities' rights independent of health issues.

SEE ALSO Activism in Africa South of the Sahara; Christianity in

Africa: Anglican; Christianity in Africa: Roman Catholicism; Cinema,
African (Francophone); Internet in Africa; Religion and Same-Sex
Behaviors: Christianity; Religion and Same-Sex Behaviors: Islam

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Broqua, Christophe. “Les ‘branchés’ sur internet en Côte d'Ivoire”
[“Trendy” people on the internet in Côte d'Ivoire]. Africultures 96 (2013):
52–61.

Broqua, Christophe. “Les pro, les anti et l'international: Mobilisations

autour de l'homosexualité en Afrique de l'Ouest” [The pro, the anti, and the
international: Mobilizations around homosexuality in West Africa]. In
Collective Mobilisations in Africa/Mobilisations collectives en Afrique,
edited by Kadya Tall, Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, and Michel Cahen,
183–204. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015.
Le Pape, Marc, and Claudine Vidal. “Libéralisme et vécus sexuels à
AbidMan” [Liberalism and sexual experiences in AbidMan]. Cahiers
internationaux de sociologie 76 (1984): 111–118.

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim. “Uses and Pleasures: Sexual Modernity, HIV/AIDS,

and Confessional Technologies in a West African Metropolis.” In Sex in
Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective,
edited by Vincanne Adams and Stacy Leigh Pigg, 245–267. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005.

Thomann, Matthew, and Robbie Corey-Boulet. “Violence, Exclusion and

Resilience among Ivoirian Travestis.” Critical African Studies 9, no. 1
(2017): 106–123.

FILMOGRAPHY

Brooks, Philip, and Laurent Bocahut, dirs. Woubi chéri. 1998.

Documentary.
Cross-Dressing in the West
ALBA BARBÉ I SERRA
Research Group on Social Control and Exclusion/Catalan Anthropology
Institute
University of Barcelona

European and American scholarly discourse on cross-

dressing from the late nineteenth century to contemporary
times.

Cross-dressing is characterized by a gender contemplation and expression

not persistent in time or space. It implies presenting one's own body, and so
one's own gender, depending on social context, especially among those
assigned and read as men, mostly identified as heterosexuals. It reveals the
dynamic experience of identities and the flexibility of categorizing, as well
as the complex situations in which one can live regarding gender identity or
expression in modern Western societies.

To place cross-dressing in a contemporary context one must examine the

emergence of discourses on sexuality in legal, religious, and medical circles
in northern Europe starting at the close of the nineteenth century. This
traMectory enables one to understand the cultural and symbolic
circumstances relating to the representation of the “cross-dresser” and
shapes a set of relations between homosexuals, transexuals, and, later on,
drag queens and transgenders. These form the basis from which people
have created the specificity of cross-dressing: through not seeing
themselves as part of the genealogy of groups that have become visible and
have made a public appeal to the collective experience.

The Transvestiten before World War II

The German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), in Die
Transvestiten (1910), introduced the transvestiten category. To cross-dress
had previously been understood in two ways, with the first being an activity
that includes the interaction between two “same-sex” persons. The German
psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833–1890) coined the phrase
Die konträre Sexualempfindung in his 1869 paper of the same name—a
phrase that is usually translated as “the contrary sexual feeling” (translation
by Alba Barbé i Serra)—and he presented both a male and a female case.
Second, it was connected to the idea of a “fetish,” as illustrated in
Psychopathia sexualis (1886; Sexual psychopathy), by the Austro-German
psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). Krafft-Ebing drew on
Le fétichisme dans l'amour (1887; Fetishism in love) by the French
psychologist Alfred Binet (1857–1911), building on the relationship
between using female clothing and sexual arousal in heterosexual men.

It is through Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds's Sexual

Inversion (1897) that the relationship “inverted sexual role =
homosexuality” is understood today. They regarded homosexuality as an
expression of nature with its roots in instinct (Ellis and Symonds, 186).
They spearheaded the debate that had commenced in 1850 in medical
circles, where innate sexual traits had been separated from those acquired.
If the inverted reversed sexual desire, sexual roles established immutably in
nature needed to be reversed too. If the difference was genetic, people could
not be punished. This had a great impact in the northern European climate
of criminalization of homosexuality.

Hirschfeld considered “monism” (Lombardi-Nash, 18) to be an inherent,

perennial presence of both sexes in the individual. Thus, no inversion
against nature existed. He propounded his “doctrine of sexual intermediary
stages” (Lombardi-Nash, 215). Taking as indicators external genitalia,
physical traits, sexual desire, and emotional characteristics, he concluded
that there were 43 million possible combinations. In a footnote in the 1915
edition of his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905; Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality [1949]), the Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had sketched his preoedipal notion explaining
a feminine component in boys. Freud hypothesized that humans are
bisexual, with coexisting masculine and the feminine parts.

Historians date the first use of the word cross-dressing as a category to

1911, crediting that use to the English philosopher Edward Carpenter
(1844–1929). Literature had used it as a verb yet never as a specific
category. Carpenter claimed to be moving away from the theories from the
end of the nineteenth century centering on the “third sex” (174) or the
uranist. In The Intermediate Sex (1921), he pointed to the large number of
existing intermediate stages “in which the body may be absolutely feminine
while mind and feelings are entirely masculine, or vice versa” (247). This
characteristic was useful in different societies. This copresence remained
unified in the depths to subsequently bifurcate into male and female. Such a
stand was close to that of Hirschfeld. The transvestiten moved from a
sexual inversion to an inversion in sexual role. It was still being theorized
as part of nature, but at the same time cross-dressing was regarded as a
cultural phenomenon.

The Split between Transvestism and

Transsexualism
In his 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon, the German American
endocrinologist Harry BenMamin (1885–1986) popularized the transsexual-
transvestiten dichotomy. He intended to resolve the confusion around
psychosexual inversion and solve the genuine transvestiten mystery.
BenMamin classified three types of transvestite. Type 1 involved mostly
heterosexual men who dress up as a way of alleviating emotions despite the
possibility that discovery could result in the breakups of their marriages.
Type 2 involved emotionally affected patients for whom dressing up begins
as a sexually exciting act and gradually loses intensity, becoming
emotionally gratifying. Type 3 included those who completely identify with
the “opposite sex.” BenMamin established transsexualism as a matter of
identity and transvestism as a perversion entailing the seeking of sexual
pleasure. Transvestites were placed squarely in the realm of fantasy,
neurosis, and compulsiveness, relegating them to the world of paraphilia
(intense and persistent sexual interest). More recently, however, the
American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders: DSM-5 (2013) differentiates all “paraphilic disorders”
(685) as atypical erotical interests, abandoning the umbrella of paraphilias
found in previous editions of the manual.

Contemporaneously a great number of “cases” were described that claimed

to shed light on the differences. The Welsh psychiatrist John B. Randell
(1959) differentiates two groups: transsexuals in the homosexual group and
“obsessive-compulsive” (1451) patients in that of transvestites. According
to Randell, transvestism is not an inversion but an obsession and is pertinent
to “exhibitionism” (1451)—a legacy from the French physician Charles
Lasègue (1816–1883). In the DSM-5, this mixture remains grouped under
the umbrella of paraphilic disorders as “exhibitionistic disorder” (685). In
1960 Vernon W. Grant issued “The Cross-Dresser: A Case Study” in the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, highlighting again the connection
between transvestite and fetishism and insisting on high heels as a phallic
symbol, an idea often found in psychoanalysis. His goal remained finding
the adequate classification: fetishist or transvestite? Grant suggested that the
person was a fetishist transvestiten. This set a trend that left its influence on
the DSM-IV (1994), DSM-IV-TR (2000), and DSM-5 (2013).

The American psychoanalytic theorist Robert Stoller (1971) describes

transvestiten as heterosexuals, following the zeitgeist. He introduces the
awareness of the phallus under the dress as part of the pleasure of cross-
dressing. Ethel Person and Lionel Ovesey (1978) explained that
transvestites are characterized by their inconstancy, beginning in childhood
or adolescence and sometimes persisting as an antidote against anxiety. The
conceptualization of anxiety is relevant because of its effects on, among
other things, the medicalization of this presumed disorder during that time.
For example, John P. Fedoroff, in a 1988 article, reported on the use of
buspirone hydrochloride, a relaxant against anxiety, to treat “transvestic
fetishism” (408). A patient had visited Fedoroff's clinic as a result of his
wife's insistence that he got sexually aroused only when wearing female
clothes. Such exclusiveness remains relevant in differential diagnoses.

The “first” works by cross-dressers appeared in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Janet Thompson (1956) wrote about the “transvestite secret.” In the 1960s
Virginia Prince, the American founder of the Society for the Second Self for
male heterosexual cross-dressers, proclaimed cross-dressers were
heterosexual men trying to express the “woman within.” She excluded
women from cross-dressing, contending that they could convey a wide
range of emotions and dress up free of stigma. Certain researchers had
claimed that women cannot be sexually aroused by wearing men's clothes
despite the “weird” cases of fetishistic cross-dressing in women reported by
the Polish American psychiatrist Emil Gutheil (1930) and Randell (1959).
In 1961 the first cross-dresser organization, Hose&Heels, started up in Los
Angeles, becoming shortly after the Foundation for Full Personality
Expression (FPE). The American sexologists Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie
Bullough (1993) point out that evidence of a “transvestite's consciousness”
(280) did not exist until the FPE's creation—a statement that must be
challenged considering the existence of such works as Memoirs by the
French transvestite abbé de Choisy (François Timoléon, 1644–1724), or the
poems and novels of Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), who described himself as
a congenital invert. The Beaumont Society (named for the famous
eighteenth-century French cross-dresser known as Mademoiselle de
Beaumont) was later founded in England in 1966, where urban clubs called
Molly Houses had been part of the “same-sex subculture” of the early
eighteenth century.

Since the 1970s research has been characterized by a psychologistic bias.

The aim seems to be understanding an “incongruous” behavior. Sexological
history reveals a weakness in the classification of social practices guided by
a positivist basis in which classificatory systems become central. The
resulting categories that people identify themselves with are inseparable
from the processes that constitute them.

Contemporary Reads
Today, from ethnographic studies limited to a single territory to
transcultural comparatives, one finds nonnormative gender practices all
over the world. Citing what appears to be an “anthropological constant,” the
authors Mustify the lack of consistency of the dichotomous ontological
model of Western society. Although, historically, disciplines such as
anthropology have certainly borne witness to the diversity of gender
identities and expressions and to sexualities in indigenous and tribal
societies, it is important to be aware of the arbitrary and deliberate use of
the relationships between practices and categories. Some of the studies are
based on exotic (often “exoticized”) ethnographic “evidence,” with an
intention akin to that of the US sexual liberation movements in the 1960s,
putting, according to Ned Katz, “the antihomo-sexuality of modern Western
society in a perspective that is socially and historically relativistic” (quoted
in Cardín 1989, 17; translation by Alba Barbé i Serra).

It is tempting to consider temporary gender expressions different from the

continuous logic “sex–gender–sexual practice–desire” (Butler 1990, 8–10)
as the symptom of a change that is taking place in modern industrial
societies. The first reactions, both from academia and the transgender
community, go in two directions. First, crossdressing is understood as an
integral part of the “transgender” horizon, thus finding a theoretical and
political model in which imageries and enticements can be unified yet with
a tendency to make the category universal. A large part of the references to
this are found in a North American context, including berdaches in Native
American culture. References in other cultures include xanith in Oman,
hiMras in South Asia, and warias in Indonesia and Papua. These references
also do this by watering down the act of cross-dressing to a prerequisite to
be under this umbrella for which no consensus exists.

Second, the performance of the gender of those who practice cross-dressing

is read as reproducing the heteronormative pairing, according to the dose of
stereotyped “femininity” or “masculinity” it seems to contain and which
does not pertain to an ideal of “transgression.” The main theoretical
influence in the approach to the tension between transgression and
reproduction is the discussion contained in two of Judith Butler's works
(1990, 1993). Her critical approach to “performative identities” (1990, 33)
is influenced by Esther Newton (1972), who wrote the first ethnography of
female impersonators in the United States. Butler emphasizes that the
performative reiteration of gender acts produces a process of reasserting
oneself that allows going from that which has been established about the
gender to that which establishes. That is, the performance or dramatization
is transgressive in itself (“subversive discontinuity” [Butler1990,ix]). After
all the criticism she received for her viewpoint on this, Butler explained that
this reasserting oneself is not political in itself and specified that the
political nature of performativity stems from a commitment to a radical
democratic practice (1993). This means Butler needed to understand the
role of economic and political systems of oppression in the shaping of
persons' and groups' identities—a direct heir to the framework of
intersectionality. Such a tension, nevertheless, is a key point in all literature
on cross-dressing. Two different examples can be found in the work of
MarMorie Garber (1992), in which cross-dressing is interpreted as a force
that bursts in and subverts, and Annie Woodhouse (1989), who questions
cross-dressing's tendency to fall repeatedly into rigid stereotypes.

Beyond the interpretations that can be made from different disciplines,

cross-dressing raises an essential issue: the deeply cultural nature of
temporality (the very quality of that which is temporary). Cross-dressing
serves as a mediator in differentiating those lives that can be apprehended
from those that one cannot apprehend. Thus, the direct impact in modern
society of its way of interpreting makes it harder or impossible to inhabit
the gender outside of a time rule guided by linearity, unidirectionality, and
constant progress.

SEE ALSO Chevalier d'Éon or Mademoiselle Beaumont (1728–1810);

Elbe, Lili (1882–1931); Institut für Sexualwissenschaft;
Transvestites/Transsexuals

BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders: DSM-5. 5th ed. Washington, DC: Author, 2013.

Barbé i Serra, Alba. Cross-Dressing: Más allá de las clasificaciones [Cross-

dressing: Beyond the classifications]. Barcelona, Spain: Bellaterra, 2017.

BenMamin, Harry. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press,

1966.

Binet, Alfred. “Le fétichisme dans l'amour: Etude de psychologie morbide.”

Revue philosophique 24: (1887) 143–167, 252–274.

Bullough, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullough. Cross-Dressing, Sex, and

Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

New York: Routledge, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New
York: Routledge, 1993.

Cardín, Alberto. Guerreros, chamanes y travestís: Indicios de

homosexualidad entre los exóticos [Warriors, shamans, and transvestites:
Indications of homosexuality among exotics]. 2nd ed. Barcelona, Spain:
Tusquets, 1989. First published 1984.
Carpenter, Edward. The Intermediate Sex. A Study of Some
Transitional Types of Men and Women. London: George Allen &
Uwin, 1921. First published 1908.

d'Exaerde, Caroline de Kerchove. “‘Dedoublement’: The Negotiation of

Gender in Transvestism.” PhD thesis, Durham University, UK, 2001.
http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/4272/

Doan, Laura. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English

Lesbian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Ekins, Richard. Male Femaling: A Grounded Theory Approach to

Cross- Dressing and Sex-Changing. London: Routledge, 1997.

Ellis, Henry Havelock, and John A. Symonds. Sexual Inversion. London:

Wilson & Macmillan, 1897. Originally published as Das konträre
Geschlechtsgefühl (Leipzig: G.H. Wigand, 1896).

Fedoroff, John P. “Buspirone Hydrochloride in the Treatment of Transvestic

Fetishism.” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 49, no. 10 (1988): 408–409.

Freud, Sigmund. Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie. Leipzig: Franz

Deuticke, 1905. Originally translated and edited as Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality by James Strachey (Oxford: Imago, 1949).

Garber, MarMorie B. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural

Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Grant, Vernon W. “The Cross-Dresser: A Case Study.” Journal of

Nervous and Mental Disease 131, no. 2 (1960): 149–159.

Gutheil, Emil. “Analysis of a Case of Transvestism.” In Sexual

Aberrations: The Phenomena of Fetishism in Relation to Sex, edited by
Wilhelm Stekel, 2:281–318. New York: Liveright, 1930.
Hirschfeld, Magnus. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress.
Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991.
Originally published as Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den
erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Berlin: Pulvermacher, 1910).

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia sexualis. Stuttgart, Germany:

Ferdinand Enke, 1886.

Newton, Esther. Mother Camp. Female Impersonators in America.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Person, Ethel, and Lionel Ovesey. “Transvestism: New Perspectives.”

Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 6, no. 3 (1978): 301–
323.

Prince, Virginia. The Transvestite and His Wife. Los Angeles: Argyle
Books, 1967.

Prince, Virginia. “The Life and Times of Virginia.” Transvestia 17, no.
100 (1979): 5–120.

Randell, John B. “Transvestitism and Trans-sexualism: A Study of 50

Cases.” British Medical Journal 2, no. 5164 (1959): 1448–1452.

Stoller, Robert J. “The Term ‘Transvestism.’” Archives of General

Psychiatry, 24 (1971): 230–237.

Thompson, Janet. “Transvestism: An Empirical Study.” Mattachine Review,

December 1956. Originally published in International Journal of Sexology
5 (1951): 216–219.

Westphal, Carl Friedrich Otto. “Die konträre Sexualempfindung: Symptom

eines neuropathitischen (psychopathitischen) Zustandes.” Archiven für
Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 2 (1869) 73–108.
Woodhouse, Annie. Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender, and
Transvestism. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989.
Cruising and Cruising Grounds
GREGORY MITCHELL
Associate Professor, Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Williams College, Williamstown, MA

A historical and contemporary look at the spaces and

behaviors that facilitate clandestine public sexual encounters
in gay and lesbian culture.

Cruising for sex has been integral to gay culture since its advent, and in a
very real sense existed even before homosexuality emerged in the
nineteenth century as an identity that one might claim. At its most simple,
cruising is the act of looking for sexual partners in public spaces such as
parks, restrooms, shopping malls, or train stations, or in such semipublic
spaces as bathhouses and bars. It can be as simple as exchanging glances
(i.e., “eye tag,” or what the Brazilians call o Mogo dos olhos, “the game of
eyes”), or it can incorporate in-group communication cues such as donning
red neckties to mark oneself as gay, or bandannas of various colors worn in
certain locations to indicate preferences for particular sex acts and positions
(i.e., “flagging,” or “the hanky code”). While a complete global history of
cruising could fill several volumes, this entry offers a brief survey of
examples from different times and places. Today, cruising has been
diminished by apps such as Grindr and Scruff, which mimic many cruising
behaviors and can fulfill similar functions (e.g., locating sexual partners in
the area). Despite the proliferation of apps, there are still online guides for
gay male cruising, as well as printed travel guides such as Spartacus
International Gay Guide (Bedford 2016), which lists specific streets,
bathrooms, and parks in every midsize and maMor city in the world, along
with times of day the activity occurs. It is also important to note that while
most of the literature and historical examples refer to gay male culture,
cruising has been deeply important for cisgender women and the
development of lesbian subcultures, and for transgender and gender-
nonconforming people.

France
Cruising is well documented in European history, with some of the more
colorful stories coming from the early eighteenth century in Paris. Police
archives from 1700 to 1750 make it possible to identify the Tuileries and
Palais-Royal gardens and the Champs-Élysées as areas where noblemen,
middle-class men, and some students, servants, and craftsmen cruised for
sex (Rey 1987). These same groups also used public squares and river
embankments. Public spaces (anywhere with a ditch, a thicket, or an
alleyway) were actually more private than many homes during this period.
In the Luxembourg gardens, Sundays and holidays (especially in the
warmer months) from 10 AM to noon and 7 PM to 9 PM were the most
popular times. In very visible public places a man might ask another the
time or for a pinch of tobacco, then they would discuss pleasures in general
before alighting on more specifically acknowledged homosexual desires. At
night and in darker places, one could be more certain why the parties were
present. Historian Michel Rey documents that police wrote in detail about
the signals involved in these encounters. One policeman noted “[a man]
having come up to me, making all the signals to me which these infamous
types are accustomed to, in order to speak to me,” “having approached me,
staring me in the face several times,” [staring] “with affectation,” and
“having pissed … in front of me several times.” Another policeman wrote
that a man cruising him showed him his penis, saying, “I'm sure you prefer
that to a pinch of tobacco.” One of the more clever exchanges went as
follows: “As I was about to let flow, [he] asked me what time it was
according to my cock (vit) and said that according to his it was high noon”
(1987, 181).
England
In nineteenth-century London there were several notable cruising grounds:
the Markets in the Royal Exchange, Moorfields, Lincoln's Inn, the south
side of St. James Park, and the arcades of Covent Garden (Norton 1992).
These were areas also known as heterosexual prostitution zones, thieves'
haunts, and molly house districts. Mollies were gay men who formed a
subculture in the early 1700s that had its own taverns, called molly houses,
which often accommodated drag and cross-dressing. Mollies cruised for sex
near the molly houses, the most notorious of which, Mother Clap's, was in
Field Lane, Holborn, northwest of St. Paul's Cathedral, with the actual
house now lying underneath present-day Charthouse Street or the Holborn
Viaduct (Norton 1992). The mollies took “maiden names” such as Primrose
Mary (a butcher in Butcher's Row), Aunt May (an upholsterer), Princess
Seraphina (another butcher), Kitty Cambric (a coal merchant), and Lady
Godiva (a waiter). Court records show that during the Whit Monday
holiday in 1732, a person named John Cooper (better known in the area as
Princess Seraphina) and one Thomas Gordon (a man of some means) drank
three hot pints of beer together, then proceeded to a walk in Chelsea Fields
and in a secluded grove of trees Cooper pulled a knife and ran away with
Gordon's clothes (Norton 1992).

In a tract called Hell upon the Earth (1729), a moralist complains that “it
would be a pretty Scene to behold them in their Clubs and Cabals, how they
assume the Air and affect the Name of Madam or Miss, Betty or Molly,” and
quotes one “affected Lady” warning another, “Where have you been you
saucy Queen? If I catch you Strouling and Caterwauling, I'll beat the Milk
out of your Breasts I will so; with a great many other Expressions of
Buffoonry and ridiculous Affectation.” The author notes that these men

have also their Walks and Appointments, to meet and pick

up one another, and their particular Houses of Resort to go
to,
 because they dare not trust themselves in an open Tavern.
About twenty of these sort of Houses have been discovered,
besides the nocturnal Assemblies of great Numbers of the like
vile Persons, what they call the Markets, which are the Royal-
Exchange, Lincolns-Inn Bog-Houses, the South-side of St.
James's-Park, the Piazzas of Covent-Garden, St. Clement's
Church-Yard, &c.

(QUOTED IN NORTON 2000; EMPHASES IN ORIGINAL)

This tract points to the important connection between mollies, molly

houses, and cruising for public sex in the early 1700s.

Sometimes, homosexual acts may have arisen more out of convenience or

necessity, as in the many cases where British Navy sailors (also notorious
for cruising) were convicted of buggery. Navy men successfully cruised one
another onboard ships despite the fact that was often punished by death, so
cruising gone awry could have fatal consequences. One officer reported,

Homosexuality was rife [on the ships], and one could see with
his own eyes how it was going on between officers. I have been
told that in some services (the Austrian and French, for
instance), nobody ever remarks about it, taking such a thing as
a natural proceeding…. Sodomy is a regular thing on ships
that go on long cruises. In the warships, I would say that the
sailor preferred it.

(GILBERT 1976, 133)

The British kept unusually detailed records, including testimony from one
young man who found James Bryan's belly to Martin Billin's back and for
some reason, yanked Bryan's penis out of Billin. He said to the court, “I
cannot tell whether there was any emission but my hand was moist after
handling it…. As I laid hold of part of his yard, the other part came out with
a spring, as if a cork had been drawn out of a bottle” (Gilbert 1976, 74). It is
not clear whether Billin and Bryan and others would have participated in
the molly subculture that existed back in London or they were having sex
with other men merely as a result of their circumstances. Today there is a
growing sense that gay-identified men have moved online to find sex
through apps such as Grindr, leaving the public cruising grounds to older
gays, closeted and/or married men, men who are “discreet” or “on the down
low,” and men who want sex with men but do not identify as gay, bi, or
queer, per se. Yet the historical records show that the complicated question
of sexual identity in cruising for casual sexual encounters has been present
in public sex scenes for more than 300 years.

United States
New York City's cruising grounds are equally storied, especially prior to
clean-up efforts in the 1990s. Moral reform societies in the 1920s classified
homosexual “perversion” as a discrete social problem, identifying
Broadway, Riverside Drive, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park West as
primary areas of gay male cruising and socializing (Chauncey 1994). The
city's parks were the most popular and secure cruising sites because it rarely
aroused suspicion to see a young man ambling about, taking in nature.
Cruising for sex was also a primary way for a newcomer to the gay scene to
become initiated into the subculture (Chauncey 1994).

The heyday for gay male cruising may have been the 1970s, when the
community had been buoyed by the gay liberation movement and not yet
been decimated by and made terrified of HIV/AIDS. In perhaps the most
famous memoir about what it was like cruising during this time in New
York, Samuel R. Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)
takes readers back to the seedy days of porn theaters, male prostitution, and
public sex. Delany argues that rather than a social ill, the thriving sexual
culture of Times Square was a rare site where people crossed racial,
economic, and sexual boundaries, encouraging complicated and nuanced
relationships. Delany's essays depict a halcyon era of cruising interrupted
by HIV, a theme that also appears in the diaries of a young gay black man
named Gary Fisher, which the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
published as Gary in Your Pocket (1996). These diaries follow Fisher from
childhood into college as he moves from questioning his sexuality to acting
on his desires by cruising in the library restroom at the University of North
Carolina and eventually having regular group sex in public parks. Fisher
uses cruising and public sex to work through his fantasies about BDSM,
race-based fetish play, and master-slave role play, but he also becomes
romantically involved with nonconsensually abusive white men. Fisher
candidly describes his fear of HIV and then his eventual knowledge that he
has contracted the virus, yet he continues to have sex in parks. He
chronicles his own decline in poignant detail, writing until the end of his
short life.

Perhaps the best-known novel about cruising in the United States is John
Rechy's Numbers (1967), which chronicles the exploits of Johnny Rio, a
man aging out of his youthful good looks who wants to reconfirm his
desirability by racking up a large number of sexual contacts in a ten-day
period. The book is devoted to richly describing the theaters, beaches, and
parks of Los Angeles's gay cruising areas—especially Griffith Park—and
the sex that gay men have there. The description of the sexual odyssey is so
explicit that it was heavily censored and difficult to publish in foreign
countries, but the book is now critically acclaimed as a landmark in gay
literature.

The most famous academic study of gay male cruising is almost certainly
sociologist Laud Humphreys's Tearoom Trade (1970), in which
Humphreys
misrepresented his identity and intentions as he visited public bathrooms
where men had sex, posing as a voyeur. Although he made the somewhat
progressive argument that men who “tea-room” (cruise in public toilets)
came from diverse backgrounds and led otherwise conventional lives, and
that about half did not perceive themselves as gay, the book is most famous
for its ethical violations: Humphreys did not get consent from his research
participants, and he even tracked the men through license plates, ambushing
them at home in disguise and interviewing them under false pretenses.

Although the glory days of cruising have passed, there are still telling
moments of conflict when straight and gay worlds collide. One notable
example is the ongoing controversy over the Magic Hedge at Chicago's
Montrose Beach, a popular site for gay cruising and also bird-watching. As
the Chicago Tribune reported, “Luis Munoz, an avid bird watcher of 12
years, has seen a remarkable range of rare winged creatures this fall
migration season…. He also has come face to face with one species he
hopes never to encounter again but knows he will: the Chicago cruiser”
(Noel 2007). As Munoz says, “It's bad, dude, real bad…. I've seen a few
things happening. Like guys in the middle of some things” (quoted in Noel
2007). Competition between the binocular-bearing birders and the cruisers
—who work together to warn each other of encroaching bird lovers—has
continued for years, with some moral crusaders pleading for more policing
while the city's only openly gay alderman advocated for leaving the men in
peace and focusing on serious and violent crimes.

Brazil
Another country with a rich cruising scene is Brazil, where cruising is
known as paquerando or fazendo pegação, or in the case of sex in public
restrooms, banheirão. Anthropologists have noted that cruising is localized
in certain areas, such as Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo and the bohemian
district of Lapa in Rio de Janeiro, but is also widely practiced practically
everywhere in public in the maMor cities. As one interviewee in a study said,
cruising happens “on the corner, buying groceries at the supermarket,
people are always cruising…. Anyone who feels horny … Must has to go
down [from the building where they live] to the street to pick someone up”
(quoted in Parker 1999, 55). Shopping malls are also an especially
important site for pegação in many Brazilian cities and towns (Teixeira
2009). Others report that in Aterro de Flamengo in Rio, cruising picks up at
dusk when the activity changes from daytime pickups and on-site
masturbation to nighttime oral and anal sex in the bushes as men head home
after work (Parker 1999). One popular gay folk etymology for the word
viado (faggot) in Brazil is that it derived in the early twentieth century from
veado (deer), because that is what men cruising in the parks at night looked
like when police startled them and they bolted (Green 1999). In Brazil the
social norm is for young men to live with their parents well into adulthood,
sometimes until they marry, and consequently, finding places for sex
indoors is difficult and often requires renting an hourly motel room, making
public sex more convenient, cheaper, and actually more private.

Lesbian Cruising
While male cruising is far more visibly widespread, cruising has been
instrumental to fostering lesbian subcultures, too. In Bangkok, for example,
the Mah Boonkrong shopping complex (known more commonly as MBK)
emerged in the 1990s as a maMor site for toms (butch women, from the
English “tomboy”) to look for dees (femmes, from the English “lady”) as
sexual partners (Wilson 2004). In US-based contexts, scholar Sally Munt
has examined the figure of the flâneur, usually a man of means who took to
strolling urban areas for leisure (1998). Munt builds on the work of Walter
BenMamin (who in turn drew on Charles Baudelaire) to emphasize the
importance of flânerie—of strolling to see and be seen, to be a gentleman
investigator of the capitalist city. For Munt, there is also a tradition of the
“lesbian flaneur,” which she maps onto various characters in literature as a
“lesbian vindication of the right to cruise” (41), thus making an important
theoretical intervention by connecting flânerie with queer theory.
Examining several novels, she describes “butch dandies” strolling through
the lesbian bars and spaces of New York in one book, and in another, the
“parodic portrait of the bulldagger as Parisian flâneur, complete with
Freudian phallus (the cigar)”—a workingclass butch who can pick up
women and who has sex next to some deserted train tracks (44).

Women's sexuality has been heavily policed historically, and this includes
cruising and public sex between women. Sarah Lamble documented the
court case R. v. Hornick (2002), which resulted from a police raid on a
women's bathhouse in Toronto, Canada. In September 2000, five male
officers raided a sold-out bathhouse event known as Pussy Palace,
investigating liquor license violations and criminal sex acts, and later
charged two members of the Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee
(Lamble 1999). The Bathhouse Committee won the case when the court
ruled that the police had violated the women's security and privacy. Davina
Cooper considers the cruising between women in queer feminist bathhouses
to be an important part of a feminist ethics of care. However, she notes that
some aspects of the bathhouse events hosted in Toronto, such as the
emphasis on “sex, the self, stranger relations, and pleasure,” posed
challenges for maintaining feminist care ethics (2009, 106). Organizers had
looked to gay male bathhouses for inspiration—a fact that some criticized.
She also describes the racism and transphobia that can flourish in the highly
sexualized environment, which constitutes “crimes against the bathhouse”
rather than private harms, and identifies these as an important point for
feminist analyses of women's public sexual practices.

Online Cruising
Gentrification, moral policing, and on-line apps have all taken their tolls on
cruising, cruising grounds, bathhouses, and public sex. However, Spartacus
still listed thousands of cruising grounds in its 2016 global guide. Grindr
and similar apps may be seen not as weakening cruising culture but as
representing an evolution in cruising. Viewed this way, the apps provide
more efficient modes of the same looking, flirting, chatting, sizing others
up, and checking out others' bodies that occurs in Brazilian public
restrooms during banheirão, in the parks of eighteenth-century Paris, and
on the escalators of a Bangkok mall. Thus, Grindr can be read as merely the
contemporary part of a much larger queer archive of cruising and its
attendant visual and embodied pleasures.

SEE ALSO Blackmail; Military/Navy in the United Kingdom; Molly

Houses; Phone Apps; Turkish Baths

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bedford, Briand. Spartacus International Gay Guide. 45th ed. Berlin:
Bruno Gmünder, 2016.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the
Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books,
1994.

Cooper, Davina. “Caring for Sex and the Power of Attentive Action:
Governance, Drama, and Conflict in Building a Queer Feminist
Bathhouse.” Signs 35, no. 1 (2009): 105–130.

Delany, Samuel R. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New
York University Press, 1999.

Fisher, Gary. Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary

Fisher. Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press,
1996.

Gilbert, Arthur N. “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700–1861.” Journal of

Social History 10, no. 1 (1976): 72–98.

Green, James. Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century

Brazil. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Humphreys, Laud. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public
Places. Chicago: Aldine, 1970.

Lamble, Sarah. “Unknowable Bodies, Unthinkable Sexualities: Lesbian and

Transgender Legal Invisibility in the Toronto Women's Bathhouse Raid.”
Social and Legal Studies 18, no. 1 (1999): 111–130.

Munt, Sally R. Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space. New
York: New York University Press, 1998.

Noel, Josh. “Nature Setting Lures Controversy: Area's Wooded Terrain

Becomes Contested Ground for 2 Groups at Odds: Bird-Watchers and Gay
Men Seeking Sex.” Chicago Tribune, 24 October 2007.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-10-
24/news/0710230155_1_birders-cruisers-red-knot

Norton, Rictor. Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in

England 1700–1830. London: GMP Publishers, 1992.

Norton, Rictor, ed. “Hell upon Earth.” Homosexuality in Eighteenth-

Century England: A Sourcebook. Updated 10 April 2000.
http://www.rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1729hell.htm

Parker, Richard Guy. Beneath the Equator: Cultures of Desire, Male

Homosexuality, and Emerging Gay Communities in Brazil. New
York: Routledge, 1999.

Rechy, John. Numbers. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Rey, Michel. “Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700–1750: The

Police Archives.” In 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during
the Enlightenment, edited by Robert Purks Maccubbin, 179–190. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Teixeira, Alexandre Eustáquio. “Discursos e representações sobre os
territórios de ‘pegação’ em Belo Horizonte” [Discourses and
representations of ‘cruising’ territories in Belo Horizonte]. In Prazeres
dissidentes [Dissident pleasures], edited by María Elvira Díaz-Benítez and
Carlos Eduardo Fígari, 238–260. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Garamonda, 2009.

Wilson, Ara. The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and

Avon Ladies in the Global City. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004.
The Cuban Revolution and Homosexuality
DAVID TENORIO
Assistant Professor of Spanish
University of Pittsburgh, PA

The Castro regime's policy toward and treatment

of homosexuals.

Along with the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the Cuban Revolution

(1953–1959) was one of the most momentous social enterprises to seize
international attention in Latin America and the Caribbean during the
twentieth century. The revolution helped significantly revamp the political
left, as it represented the epitome of anticolonialism and American
interventionism, as well as self-determination, self-governance, and social
welfare. The period known as the Cuban Revolution is often situated as
starting in 1953 with the first insurgent uprising and culminating with the
Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista's (1901–1973) escape from the island on
31 December 1958. As a radical rearrangement of sociopolitical and
cultural structures, the social reforms brought about by Fidel Castro's
(1926–2016) revolution did not always positively address issues of gender
and sexuality in Cuba. The sexual politics of the Cuban Revolution are at
times contradictory, yet historically and culturally contingent. At the very
base, any gender or sexual practice, value, or expression that was unaligned
with the heterosexual, masculinist nationalism embraced by the Communist
regime after 1959 was perceived as an act of counterrevolutionary
dissidence that had to be eradicated to contain the growth of “antisocial”
sentiments that could hinder the teleology of progress embodied by the
Castro regime.
SEXILIO AND MIGRATION

The term sexilio refers to “sexile” (sexual exile)—that is, the migratory
experience that LGBT individuals from Latin America and the
Caribbean undergo based on sexual orientation, gender expression,
and/or sexual practices. This forced displacement occurs as a response
to state persecution, social violence, or discrimination owing to their
nonadherence to normative sexual identity, practices, and discourses.
In the context of Cuba, the apex of the queer diaspora took place
between 20 April and 31 October 1980, during what is commonly
known as the Mariel boatlift, under Fidel Castro's socialist regime.
Following an incident at the Peruvian embassy in Havana in 1980, in
which a bus driver drove a bus full of passengers onto the embassy's
premises in a desperate attempt to seek political asylum, Castro
announced that Cubans wishing to leave the island were permitted to
do so through Mariel Harbor, located 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of
Havana.

This decision came after a very stringent foreign affairs policy under
which Cubans needed special approval to leave or travel abroad. In the
midst of tense political relations between Cuba and the United States,
social unrest on the island grew rapidly as certain factions of society
that strongly supported the regime showed disdain and disgust for
those wanting to leave. Castro extended an invitation to Cuban
Americans to come with boats to pick up any relatives wishing to flee.
However, when the passenger ships arrived, Castro not only allowed
relatives to travel but also ordered all social “scum” (escoria)—such as
homosexuals, prostitutes, criminals, and the mentally ill, against whom
he led a public excoriating campaign—shipped to the United States. In
his autobiography, the exiled Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas describes
how
 to be able to depart from the Port of Mariel, people had to
leave the Peruvian embassy with a safe-conduct issued by
State Security, and had to return to their homes and wait
until the Castro government gave them the order to
leave…. The homes of those waiting for exit permits were
surrounded by mobs and stoned; in the Vedado, several
people were stoned to death…. Opposite my room someone
had put up various posters reading: HOMOSEXUALS,
GET OUT; SCUM OF THE EARTH, GET

OUT. (1993, 279–280)

The first Cubans disembarked in Key West, Florida, on 21 April 1980.

Overall, approximately 125,000 arrived as part of the Mariel boatlift,
which constituted an immigration crisis and created a diplomatic
hardship in US-Cuba relations. The influx of queer Cuban immigrants
also transformed Miami's social landscape and shaped a sense of gay
cubanidad abroad. The Cuban AdMustment Act of 1966—commonly
known as the wet foot, dry foot policy—facilitated the assimilation of
Cubans into American society as it stipulated that any Cuban citizen
who entered the United States could obtain residency after one year.
The US-Cuban thaw of 2014 put an end to this policy, eliminating the
possibility of documented Cuban migration into the United States.
More recently, the decision announced on 16 June 2017 by the US
president Donald Trump to roll back the US-Cuba policies adopted by
the previous administration shows a stark intent to revive Cold War
trade policies and sanctions on Cuba.

In general, migration crises in Latin America and the Caribbean are

considered to be a phenomenon of globalization. In late 2015
approximately 6,000 Cuban citizens en route to the US-Mexican
border were left stranded in Costa Rica as a result of stringent
immigration laws that restricted their free passage. This immigration
crisis was further complicated by the end of the Cuban AdMustment Act
of 1966, forcing Cubans, including sexual exiles, to find refuge in
different countries throughout Latin America. Although the Cuban
government has officially stopped persecuting sexual minorities, these
groups continue to face social stigmatization and often choose exile.

“Sexile” and sexual migration from Latin America and the Caribbean
should be understood as a complex process of migration in which
socioeconomic, class, and racial factors, among others, constitute a
tightly woven assemblage. It is undeniable, however, that the waves of
LGBT migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean during the
second half of the twentieth century have formed enclaves of queer
latinidad (Rodríguez 2003) in North American city centers. Although
many members of the LGBT community in Latin America and the
Caribbean have fled their place of origin because of state persecution,
social violence, family reMection, discrimination, and other forms of
systemic oppression, others decide to remain in their home countries.
“Sexile,” sexual migration, and choosing to stay may all function as
viable forms of political resistance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arenas, Reinaldo. Before Night Falls. Translated by Dolores M. Koch.

New York: Viking, 1993.

Rodríguez, Juana María. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices,

Discursive Spaces. New York: New York University Press,
2003.

David Tenorio
Assistant Professor of Spanish
University of Pittsburgh, PA
The Cuban Revolution was undoubtedly nationalistic from its onset and
sought to alleviate and eradicate the social ills left behind by the Cuban
republic: social inequality and extreme poverty, economic dependence on
the United States, reliance on sugar plantations as the basis of a national
economy, and governmental corruption, as well as social immorality (BeMel
2001). The accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution, however abrupt,
included radical changes in the agricultural, educational, social welfare, and
public health-care sectors. In terms of its gender and sexual politics, the
Cuban Revolution embraced a heterosexual masculinist paradigm based on
the principles of virility, violence, and patriarchy. To a degree, it inherited a
set of presumptions about sexual practices and values that came from the
region's historical, sociopolitical, and cultural transformations—mainly,
machismo, the family as the structural base of society, a set class and racial
hierarchy, and an obsession with virginity (Hamilton 2012). In other words,
homosexuality, gender fluidity, and sexual diversity—terms that are widely
used today—along with homophobia, discrimination, and violence,
coexisted prior to the advent of the Castro regime but acquired different
connotations under the newly Sovietized socialist government.

The Problem of Homosexuality to the

Revolution
Homosexuality during the onset of the Cuban Revolution was regarded as a
moral threat to its masculinist proMect. The heroic teleology of progress, so
avidly represented in the image of the virile guerrilla fighter, eschewed any
alternative form of masculinity—let alone femininity. This vision of
maleness was paradoxically homosocial and homophobic. As social
constructs of a conflicted notion of masculinity, homosexuality and
homophobia have been central forces in defining the sociopolitical and
cultural characteristics of the Cuban fatherland—a national culture whose
imaginary is lubricated by the heroism of icons such as José Martí (1853–
1895) and Castro. Official historical accounts have privileged this type of
subMectivity as the sole legitimate actor in the fight for liberation and social
transformation. Cuban nationalism after 1959 also became a moral
enterprise to extirpate all social imperfections from the past: the
feminization of men and the masculinization of women (Sierra Madero
2006). The concept of “the new man” skillfully drafted as a new
subMectivity by Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967), the Argentine Marxist
revolutionary and Castro's close associate, in El socialismo y el hombre en
Cuba (1965; Socialism and man in Cuba) set the new parameters under
which Cubans would measure their commitment to the structural and social
reforms brought about by the revolution. But the solidification of a new
social paradigm regarding gender and sexuality also sought to regulate,
patrol, and correct the private practices of intimate everyday life. On the
relationship between sexuality and social imagination in Cuba, the critic
Emilio BeMel establishes that “this revolutionary Cuban subMect ought to be
free of the impurities of the bourgeois past, willing to sacrifice for his
country, ready to renounce utilitarian values, and eager to possess a great
disposition and aptitude for the struggle (a physical struggle, if need be) for
nationalist and socialist ideals” (2001, 99).

Homosexuality became more explicitly politicized with the advent of the

Cuban Revolution and was perceived as a form of ideological divergence—
of political dissidence—that needed to be rehabilitated by socialist values of
labor, sacrifice, and struggle for the sake of the nation's welfare. The
American Mournalist Lee Lockwood captured Castro's sentiments about
homosexuality during a taped interview in 1965. On the role of
homosexuals within the new social order of the Cuban Revolution, Castro
answered as follows:

But above all, I do not believe that anybody has a definite

answer as to what causes homosexuality. I think the problem
must be studied very carefully. But I will be frank and say that
homosexuals should not be allowed in positions where they are
able to exert influence upon young people. In the conditions
 under which we live, because of the problems which our
country is facing, we must inculcate our youth with the spirit of
discipline, of struggle, of work.

(QUOTED IN YOUNG 1981, 8)

Castro's view of homosexuality inspired some decisions to approach the

study of sexuality from a pathological lens.

FRESA Y CHOCOLATE (1993; TOMÁS GUTIÉRREZ ALEA

AND JUAN CARLOS TABÍO)

Before the 1993 film Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and chocolate),

representations of gay men in Cuban cinema were few and far
between, and they almost always appeared as minor characters who
provided comic relief by way of their exaggerated effeminacy. Fresa
y chocolate changed that with its portrayal of Diego (Jorge Perugorría)
as a positive and sympathetic homosexual male protagonist. Since
then, representations of gay men and other sexual minorities in Cuban
cinema have increased exponentially, although none—with the
possible exception of Santa y Andrés (2016; directed by Carlos
Lechuga)—has explored the intersection of homosexuality and politics
under Fidel Castro (r. 1959–2008) or Raúl Castro (r. 2008–2018) as
thoroughly as Fresa y chocolate.

The film tells the story of David (Vladimir Cruz), a politically and
sexually inexperienced university student, and the relationship he
develops with Diego, a victim of state persecution of homosexuals.
Not coincidentally, the film is set in 1979, at the tail end of the
Quinquenio Gris (literally, “Five Gray Years”), when many
intellectuals, educators, and artists were persecuted for their
unorthodox views on the Cuban Revolution, sexuality, and other
matters of concern to the state. The 1971 Primer Congreso Nacional de
Educación y Cultura (First National Congress on Education and
Culture) is symptomatic in this regard; the declaration that came out of
that congress set very strict limits as to what may be considered
“revolutionary art” (i.e., art in support of Fidel Castro's 1959 Cuban
Revolution) and who may be considered a revolutionary artist:

The cultural sectors shall not be used as a means of

proliferation for false intellectuals who pretend to
transform snobbism, extravagance, homosexuality, and
other social aberrations into expressions of revolutionary
art…. The ideological formation of young writers and
artists is a central task of the revolution. It is our duty to
educate them in Marxism-Leninism, [and] to steep them in
the ideas of the revolution.

(8, 13; TRANSLATED BY PAUL A.

SCHROEDER RODRÍGUEZ)

Against this backdrop, the film's insistent references to a wide range of

heterodox thinkers and artists, many of them homosexual, may be read
as Diego's attempt to recover a lost past of experimentalism and
internationalism in the early 1960s, before Marxism-Leninism became
the official doctrine of the state and, significantly, before the Unidades
Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAPs) forced labor camps were
set up between 1965 and 1968 to “reform” conscientious obMectors,
political dissenters, and homosexuals—all of them considered equally
counterrevolutionary at the time.

This political dimension of the film has been at the center of heated
debates between those who consider the film state propaganda and
those who see it as the work of dissident film directors. Take, for
example, David's characterization of singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés's
internment in the UMAP camps as a “mistake.” Diego responds by
asking who will pay for those mistakes, and the matter ends with
silence on David's part. This brief exchange exemplifies a strategy that
director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea used to similar effect in his 1968
Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of underdevelopment) of
presenting viewers with confronting perspectives but leaving the
conflict unresolved. For this reason, critics who dismiss the film as
state propaganda are as partial as those who celebrate it as dissenting
art. In fact, the film's truth does not lie fully in either of these
perspectives but rather in their confrontation, so that, ultimately, the
more interesting question is what these different perspectives might
reveal about the complex relationship between alternative sexualities
and alternative politics in Cuba in the early 1990s, a time of profound
political and economic crisis, known as the Special Period, that
ushered in intense and critical debates on the future of the revolution.
For example, the very production of Fresa y chocolate was facilitated
by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry's success
in reversing the state's censorship of Alicia en el pueblo de maravillas
(1991; directed by Daniel Díaz Torres; Alice in Wondertown), a film
with much more critical views on the state's monopoly on knowledge
and political expression. In the long term, however, Fresa y chocolate's
most important legacy is having effectively opened the door to
LGBTQ-themed films throughout Latin America, by demonstrating
that audiences were eager to support engaging films with
psychologically complex characters, regardless of their sexuality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“El Primer Congreso Nacional de Educación y Cultura.” Revista de la

Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí, no. 2 (1971): 5–16.
 Santí, Enrico Mario. “Fresa y chocolate: The Rhetoric of Cuban
Reconciliation.” MLN 113, no. 2 (1998): 407–425.

Venegas, Cristina. “Fresa y chocolate: The Allure of Passions and

Controversies.” Despite All Adversities: Spanish-American Queer
Cinema, edited by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Debra A. Castillo, 31–
52. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.

Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez

Professor of Spanish
Amherst College, Amherst, MA

Despite his intention to understand the causes of homosexuality, his vision

sought to identify, contain, analyze, and eradicate a “problem” that opposed
the spirit of the revolution. To this end, homophobia was institutionalized.

Medical discourse was also aligned with the revolution's pathological vision
of homosexuality. In the Mournal Sexología: Divulgación científica y
educación sexual (1936–1963?; Sexology: Scientific dissemination and
sexual education), Ángel Custodio Arce (c. 1963), the top sexologist during
the early decades of the revolution, called on society to combat tolerance
for homosexuals and prostitutes, while warning against the moral vices of a
capitalist society. Moreover, by associating homosexuality with the
perceived ideological decay of capitalism, the revolution inevitably framed
practices of same-sex desire within the geopolitics of the Cold War. That is,
homosexuality was seen as a practice of political dissidence and of
capitalist excess. In that sense, acts of social repudiation and homophobia
were necessary to combat the public enemies of Cuban socialism.

One of the first public displays of gay cleansing occurred in 1961 when a
massive socialist raid against homosexuals took place in Havana. Known as
Noche de las Tres Pes (Operation Three P's)—for pederasts, prostitutes, and
pimps—the operation was carried out as a xenophobic act to cleanse the
streets of the capital city. These police raids set a precedent for the
treatment of sexually diverse subMects under the Communist regime. Today,
the fact that some transgender community members face police harassment
and discrimination on a daily basis serves as a case in point.

Creation of the UMAP Camps

In line with a socialist agenda of bringing change through labor and
productivity, Castro and other military officials created the Unidades
Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAPs; Military Units to Aid
Production) during the 1960s. These camps were created with the intention
of tackling the moral conversion of social deviants, including homosexuals,
prostitutes, hippies, rebel youth, religious zealots, intellectuals, priests, drug
addicts, and any other outcasts who were seen as a “counterrevolutionary”
threat to the Communist regime. The UMAPs were agricultural forced-
labor concentration camps run by the Cuban army from November 1965 to
July 1968 in the province of Camagüey, located on the east side of the
island. Recruitment to the UMAPs came from denouncements by the secret
police, neighbors, or Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees for
the Defense of the Revolution), whose main scope involved policing and
monitoring the proper moral behavior of neighborhood groups according to
socialist statutes.

An estimated 35,000 internees are believed to have performed forced labor

in sugarcane plantation camps not only as a strategy for sexual reeducation
through labor but also to remedy the labor shortage in agriculture, as well as
to reduce the labor cost of military soldiers (Ponte 2014). In a 2012
interview, María Elena Solé Arrondo, a psychiatrist whose clinical work
focused on the “rehabilitation” of homosexual interns at the UMAPs,
suggests that these camps were also centers where psychological studies on
the categorization of homosexual behavior were being conducted prior to
their closure in July 1968 (Guerra and Sierra Madero 2016). Under the
direct command of the Ministerio de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias
(Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces), Solé Arrondo was part of a
clinical team in charge of identifying homosexuals based on an A1 to A4
scale, where A1 identified a subMect with a very discreet homosexual
tendency, and A4 a subMect with an exuberant homosexual tendency. The
study also sought to identify the causes of homosexuality and devise
clinical treatments for their integration into the socialist way of life.

Impact on Culture
The new ideological and moral principles of the Cuban Revolution
regarding homosexuality and sexual diversity not only permeated the
sociopolitical spheres of the newly transformed society but steadfastly
extended to the cultural and aesthetic fields. In a speech delivered to Cuban
intellectuals in June 1961 at the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library),
Castro also demarcated the margins of what revolutionary culture ought to
be and the functions of the Cuban intellectual as a fighter for the revolution.
“Esto significa que dentro de la Revolución todo; contra la Revolución,
nada” (This means that within the revolution, everything; against the
revolution, nothing), Castro infamously asserted, as many of the artists
present at the time felt that their freedom to create was being truncated by
the new social order. Many of the openly gay intellectuals were among the
first ones to experience the discrimination, violence, and ostracism of the
revolution. Central cultural figures, such as Virgilio Piñera (1912–1979),
whose literary production incorporated issues of corporeality and sexuality,
and Antón Arrufat (1935–), whose theater pieces critiqued the new form of
government, were rapidly dismissed from important roles in cultural
institutions. José Lezama Lima's (1910–1976) novel Paradiso (1966;
Paradise), which treated the topic of homoeroticism extensively in its eighth
chapter, infuriated official cultural authorities. Other gay artists and
intellectuals also fell prey to immediate internment in the UMAPs.

Post-UMAP Treatment of Homosexuals

The international denouncement of the Castro regime's treatment of
intellectuals by prominent Latin American writers such as Mario Vargas
Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, along with international pressures
on the treatment of Cuban counterrevolutionaries, led to the subsequent
dismantling of these concentration camps. But even after the closure of the
UMAPs, discrimination against and persecution and ostracism of
homosexuals in Cuba continued. Most notably, the unrelenting persecution
of the writer Reinaldo Arenas is an example of the institutionalized
homophobia that characterized the Castro regime even after 1968. Many
decades later, in 2010, Castro assumed total responsibility for the
marginalization of homosexuals in the UMAPs in an interview with the
Mexican newspaper La Jornada. However, he never apologized to his
constituents in any of his public speeches in Cuba.

It was not until 1979 that homosexuality was legally recognized, and in
2013 discrimination based on sexual orientation was made illegal in Cuba.
The Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX; National Center for
Sex Education), created in 1990 and now directed by Mariela Castro Espín
(1962–; niece of Fidel Castro), celebrates on 17 May of each year La
Jornada Cubana contra la Homofobia y la Transfobia (Cuban Day against
Homophobia and Transphobia) as an institutional attempt to bring visibility
to LGBT rights in Cuba. Although transgender rights constitute an integral
part of CENESEX's political agenda, same-sex marriage legislation is
nonexistent. The fight for LGBT rights and its implications for daily life in
Cuba continue to carry sociopolitical, cultural, and historical contradictions.
For instance, the creation of a transgender network, called TransCuba, does
not ensure the daily survival of trans women, a very vulnerable population
subMected to violence and discrimination based on gender expression, sexual
orientation, and/or gender identity. Independent LGBT groups and
grassroots organizations in Cuba that demonstrate an unwillingness to
collaborate with CENESEX's political agenda are often scrutinized and
delegitimized for their perceived dissidence, signaling that any social
change can be mediated only through the official institutions of the
revolution.

SEE ALSO Antes que Anochezca (1992; Reinaldo Arenas); Cold War and
Sexuality in Latin America; Human Rights and Activism in Latin America;
Mexican Revolution and Sexuality

BIBLIOGRAPHY
BeMel, Emilio. Gay Cuban Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001.

Castro, Fidel. “Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz,

Primer Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario y Secretario del PURSC,
como conclusión de las reuniones con los intelectuales cubanos” [Speech
by Commander Fidel Castro Ruz, Prime Minister of the Revolutionary
Government and Secretary of the PURSC, as a conclusion of the meetings
with the Cuban intellectuals]. Departamento de Versiones Taquigráficas, 16,
23, and 30 June 1961.
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/esp/f300661e.html

Custodio Arce, Ángel. “Lacras Sociales del Capitalismo” [Social scourges

of capitalism]. Sexología: Divulgación científica y educación sexual 1 (c.
1963): 64–66.

Guerra, Lillian, and Abel Sierra Madero. “Lo de las UMAP fue un trabaMo
‘top secret’: Entrevista a la Dra. María Elena Solé

Arrondo” [The UMAP was a “top secret” Mob: Interview with Dr. María
Elena Solé Arrondo]. Cuban Studies 44 (2016): 357–366.

Hamilton, Carrie. Sexual Revolutions in Cuba: Passion, Politics, and

Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Matthews, Herbert L. “Cuban Rebel Is Visited in Hideout.” New York
Times, 24 February 1957.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/matthews/matthews022457.
pdf

Ponte, Antonio José. “¿Qué fueron las UMAP?” [What was the UMAP?].
Diario de Cuba, 23 February 2014.
http://www.diariodecuba.com/cuba/1393116891_7285.html

RoMas, Rafael. Historia mínima de la Revolución cubana [Short history of

the Cuban Revolution]. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2015.

Sierra Madero, Abel. Del otro lado del espeMo: La sexualidad en la

construcción de la nación cubana [On the other side of the mirror:
Sexuality in the construction of the Cuban nation]. Havana: Fondo Editorial
Casa de las Américas, 2006.

Young, Allen. Gays under the Cuban Revolution. San Francisco: Grey Fox
Press, 1981.
Darnell v. Lloyd (1975)
STEPH TAI
Associate Professor
University of Wisconsin Law School, Madison

KATRINA C. ROSE
Independent scholar
Moline, IL

The first federal court decision in favor of a constitutional

claim to a birth certificate sex-designation change in the
absence of a statute contemplating such changes.

In 1975 the Stonewall riots (1969) were still a recent memory and the notion
of substantive LGBT antidiscrimination law was in its infancy. The modern
era of US transgender law, however, was already two decades old— yet it
was on a bifurcated traMectory. In 1955 the state of Illinois enacted
legislation specifically contemplating the desire and need for a change of
sex designation following transition. Arizona, Louisiana, Hawaii, Utah, and
North Carolina followed suit (Taylor, Tadlock, and Poggione 2013–2014;
Rose 2004; Utah 1975).

These statutes, as well as the treatment options available to those who

would seek to use them, are products of an era that all but exclusively
contemplated surgery-based transition, a reality reflected in the legal and
community language of the time (Stryker 2008). Consequently, the term
transsexual is more situationally proper for discussing the early statutes and
cases than is the term transgender. Moreover, irrespective of the degree to
which they may currently be used by individuals who eschew transsexual in
favor of transgender or some other term of choice, the term transsexual
birth certificate statute is commonly used to encompass laws that specify a
legal procedure by which those who have undergone gender transition can
conform their birth certificates to the reality of their post-transition lives
(Rose 2009). That term is thus wholly appropriate for the Illinois statute and
those enacted during the quarter-century thereafter.

The first six transsexual birth certificate statutes yielded no published

decisional law to reinforce their clear textual meanings. In no small part,
this was attributable to the very existence of the statutes themselves
(Matambanadzo 2005). In the absence of a statute, the threshold question
always was whether a court could even hear a request for a legal change of
sex; litigation that produced negative answers to that question also
produced several published court opinions. With the existence of a statute
mandating a positive answer to that question, the only remaining issue for a
court was whether a petitioner met the standard(s) set out under the given
state's statute (e.g., providing acceptable proof of having undergone surgery
or other statutorily sufficient medical procedures). Even this issue did not
manage to make transsexual birth certificate statutes visible to the maMority
of legal practitioners. Not until the twenty-first century did an appellate
court (in Illinois) address whether the requirements of a state sexchange
statute had been met (Fletcher 2006).

The main challenge faced by transsexual persons arose in states that lacked
a clear statutory requirement for birth certificate sex-designation changes;
there, they faced legal hurdles of whether or not their requests were seen as
legally cognizable—that is, whether their requests were even reviewable by
courts under accepted legal principles. It is not clear when or where the first
such birth certificate sex-change request was made, but during the 1960s
some were successful (either administratively or Mudicially). These also
resulted, however, in no published opinions that would establish legal
precedent (Tierney and O'Brien 1968). Beginning in 1966, courts in
Murisdictions without statutes did begin issuing published opinions on the
issue. The most infamous and persuasive of these came from England in
1970 (Rose 1999–2000), although some of the more well-known US
decisions came from trial courts in New York. These courts uniformly held
against recognition of transition, although some did provide occasional
support for name changes (Meyerowitz 2002; Rose 1999–2000).

Later in the decade, a Virginia court appears to have approved of a birth

certificate change in the absence of a statute (Gaysweek 1978), but no
published opinion accompanied the decision. Perhaps more importantly for
trans people born in the state, Virginia did enact a birth certificate statute
the following year (Rose 2004). In 1978 a Pennsylvania trial court also
issued an opinion memorializing its favorable decision regarding a birth
certificate change, but even as a court it could only request such from the
petitioner's state of birth, because the Indiana-born petitioner's birth
certificate was under control of that state's authorities. In K v. Health
Division (1977), however, the Oregon Supreme Court fell in line with the
view that a statute was necessary for a request to be accepted. Although that
trans-negative reasoning broke no new ground, it was the Mudgment of a
state's highest court. This was more representative of the legal landscape
faced by Diana Darnell when she brought her case in a federal district court
in Connecticut.

Diana Darnell Takes Administrative and

Judicial Action
Diana Darnell underwent gender-confirmation surgery in New York in
1972. A native of New London, Connecticut, her path to transition may not
have included the genderidentity clinic in that state's capital; a Hartford
(Connecticut) Courant feature noted that her then-ongoing case had no
connection to the clinic (Lang 1975). But her path did cross the office of
Connecticut's commissioner of health, Franklin Foote. Darnell requested
that Foote's agency change the sex designation on her birth certificate.
Foote held an administrative hearing on the matter. Darnell was represented
by counsel and presented evidence in support of her position. Foote denied
her request, and Darnell appealed that decision to the New London County's
court of common pleas, a state court. However, she did not do so within the
mandated time frame. Based on this procedural failing, the court of
common pleas upheld Foote's decision.

Darnell then looked to the federal court system for a remedy based on
constitutional civil rights principles of equal protection. In the interim,
Douglas Lloyd had taken over as commissioner of health. He asserted that
the combination of Darnell's administrative action and failed attempt to
appeal to the court of common pleas amounted to res Mudicata, a final,
substantive determination of Darnell's legal rights that precluded any other
court from again considering them. M. Joseph Blumenfeld, the federal
district Mudge handling the case, reMected this position out of hand, pointing
out that the only thing that established precedent required a plaintiff in
Darnell's position to do was to exhaust her administrative remedies before
launching a civil rights action, which was precisely what she had already
done.

Thus, the commissioner of health lost on his procedural argument. Still,

Darnell was not able to claim a full victory. Blumenfeld expressed disdain
for the relatively sparse legal arguments and factual support that each side
in the case had brought to him. He characterized Darnell as having used “a
‘shotgun’ approach, predicating the wrongfulness of the Commissioner's
conduct on many different grounds” (Darnell v. Lloyd 1975, 1213). Lloyd's
total response to all the claims consisted of merely two pages, which
Blumenfeld derided as “frivolous” (1213). However, Blumenfeld
acknowledged that, at a minimum, one of Darnell's theories constituted a
valid legal cause of action and could prove successful if she was able to
sufficiently demonstrate that she was female. In Blumenfeld's view, the
commissioner's policy of granting some birth certificate changes on bases
that were not listed under statute but not those that transsexual persons such
as Darnell would seek implicated principles of equal protection. In
suggesting the merits of Darnell's equal protection claims, Blumenfeld
noted that Darnell's fundamental marriage rights “at least tangentially”
supported her claims regarding her birth certificate sex-change request
(1214).

No subsequent published opinion addressed Darnell's case. In a 2000 case

not involving transition, the Connecticut Supreme Court seemed eager to
point out that Blumenfeld had found only that Darnell's complaint had
stated a cause of action and that he had not rendered a final Mudgment in her
favor. The implication seems to be that, had a case similar to Darnell's then
been before the Connecticut high court, it might not have ruled in line with
Blumenfeld. State statutory law soon thereafter embraced the notion of
“gender change,” although the timing seems to have been coincidental
(Connecticut 2001).

News reports subsequent to the 1975 ruling do indicate that Darnell did
succeed in obtaining a birth certificate with a female sex designation. That
process, however, was not simple for her. It was not until August of the
following year that she and the state were able to reach a settlement. The
state agreed to amend her birth certificate “by crossing out, not obliterating,
the ‘male’ designation and writing in ‘female’ followed by asterisks.” The
asterisks would lead to a footnote indicating that she had undergone
surgical transition (Bridgeport [Connecticut] Telegram 1976, 42).
Arguably, this achieved what she had been seeking: a birth certificate that
would allow her to obtain a passport and marry a man, although in the
modern era, this success would seem partial, at best.

An Era of Inconsistent Judicial Rulings on

Trans Law
Victory in court was possible for individual trans persons during the 1970s.
Consistency in court victories, however, was elusive—a problem not
exclusive to the first post-Stonewall decade (Haider-Markel and Taylor
2016). With the exception of the door to federal Title VII antidiscrimination
protections being firmly closed (Holt 1997), until the twenty-first century
(Rose 2001), no overarching national rules emerged. A notable victory in
one case in one Murisdiction typically would be tempered, or even fully
offset, by losses on the same issue in other Murisdictions.

Courts in Minnesota, California, and Iowa ruled in favor of transsexuals

seeking government funding for transition-related health care (Doe v. State,
Dept. of Public Welfare [1977]; G.B. v. Lackner [1978]; J.D. v. Lackner
[1978]; Pinneke v. Preisser [1980]), but a federal court in Georgia ruled
contrarily (Witherspoon 1980). The Illinois Supreme Court partially
nullified Chicago's anti–crossdressing ordinance, in no small part because
of the existence of the state's transsexual birth certificate statute (City of
Chicago v. Wilson [1978]), and a federal court relied on that decision to
partially nullify Houston's ordinance (Doe v. McConn [1980]), despite the
lack of a Texas statute regarding gender changes on birth certificates. But a
morass of conflicting decisions in Ohio led to no clear rule on such laws
even within that state (City of Cincinnati v. Adams [1974]; City of
Columbus v. Zanders [1974]; City of Columbus v. Zanders [1970]), and the
US Supreme Court declined to take up the issue when presented with the
opportunity to do so (Advocate 1974). In cases not directly implicating birth
certificates, a New Jersey court recognized a transsexual woman's
postsurgical sex status for purposes of a marriage to a cis man (M.T. v. J.T.
[1976]) but a New York court did not do similarly for a transsexual man's
marriage to a cis woman (B. v. B [1974]).

The birth certificate issue also saw no uniformity even in the realm of
administrative interpretive law. In 1975 the attorney general of
Massachusetts formally interpreted a non-trans-specific vital statistics
framework in favor of transsexuals six years before the state enacted a
statute (Bellotti 1975; Rose 2004). The corresponding offices in North
Carolina and Florida, however, insisted on the necessity of a transsexual-
specific statute (S. Smith 1976) to find grounds for requiring state agencies
to make requested gender changes on birth certificates. Though likely a
coincidence, North Carolina did enact such a statute mere weeks after
Blumenfeld's Darnell opinion. Florida, however, has never enacted such a
statute, with its lone published court decision being a hostile reMection of a
birth certificate from another state lacking such statutory authority
(Kantaras v. Kantaras [2004]).

Minimal Influence of Darnell v. Lloyd

At the time of Blumenfeld's published opinion, six states had transsexual
birth certificate statutes. Iowa, California, Michigan, and Virginia (as well
as the territory of Guam) had also enacted such statutes by the end of the
decade (Rose 2004; Guam 1980). The following decade, generally regarded
as one of civil rights retrenchment rather than advancement, saw Arkansas;
Oregon; Massachusetts; Washington, DC; Georgia; Colorado; New Jersey;
Missouri; and Wisconsin offer transsexual people a statutory avenue to
transition recognition (Rose 2004). These states represent a range that fell
outside of traditional geographical and political groupings as to LGBT-
friendliness (Taylor, Tadlock, and Poggione 2013–2014).

During the last half of the 1970s and on through the 1980s, state recognition
of transition grew substantially—via statute. The notable published legal
decision of the 1980s came from a probate court Mudge who misgendered
the trans woman petitioner even while offering the seemingly contradictory
acknowledgment that he would abide by a transsexual birth certificate
statute if his state had one (In re Ladrach [1987]). His state was Ohio,
however, which did not have a relevant birth certificate gender-change
statute.

The Darnell v. Lloyd decision stands out as a positive one in an era rife
with, at best, inconsistent transgender legal rules. However, as the
subsequent activity in Darnell v. Lloyd indicates, her victory was but a
prelude to a compromise (Bridgeport [Connecticut] Telegram 1976;
Hartford [Connecticut] Courant 1976). It also had very little impact on
Mudicial decision-making in the ensuing four decades. Some commentators
have made some effort, albeit not extensive (Rosky 2013; Weiss 2001;
Matambanadzo 2005), to explore the contours of how transsexuals' rights
are “tangentially” negatively affected by birth certificate restrictions. More
frequently one can find commentators, including unapologetically anti-
LGBT ones (Zakaria 2005), simply pointing to Darnell having been able to
avoid having summary Mudgment granted against her (Madeira 2002; Brown
2001; Tobin 2006). Others refer to the decision via what appears to be little
more than obligatory or tangential citations (Markowitz 2008; Barry et al.
2016; Strasser 2003). Commentators adopting an activist posture criticize
the Murists who wrote post-Darnell negative birth certificate decisions
without even paying heed to Blumenfeld's decision (Rose 1999–2000; Frye
and Rose 2003).

Indeed, two of the more ferociously anti-recognition decisions completely

ignored Darnell (In re Ladrach [1987]; Littleton v. Prange [1999]). Even
the single pro-recognition decision (In re Gardiner [2001]) that properly
contextualized Darnell viewed it as being of less importance than the New
Jersey decision (M.T. v. J.T.) that emerged in 1976 while Darnell was
negotiating her compromise with Connecticut. And that pro-recognition
decision was subsequently overruled by an anti-recognition one, an opinion
that mentioned Darnell only via quotation of the decision it was overruling
(In re Gardiner [2002]).

One is Must as likely to see Darnell v. Lloyd deployed, either in Mudicial

decision-making or in commentary, for the purely procedural question that
Blumenfeld quickly brushed aside in 1975—namely, whether Darnell's
interaction with the administrative arm of the state of Connecticut
constituted res Mudicata, a full and complete determination of her rights.
Soon after the Darnell decision was issued, it came into play when a New
York attorney was told that a state administrative proceeding did foreclose
his federal action (Hammer v. Town of Greenburgh [1977]) and when a
Puerto Rican police officer claiming wrongful termination was able to go
forward with some of his claims (Jimenez v. Toledo [1978]). Decades later,
another police officer was able to do so as well, in part as a result of
Blumenfeld having distinguished otherwise-controlling US Supreme Court
precedent (United States v. Utah Construction & Mining Co. [1966]) so as
to see a distinction between proceedings that are “Mudicial in nature” and
those that are merely advisory (Eaton v. Siemens [2007]) for purposes of
subsequent federal civil rights actions.

Understudied Role in Legal Academic

Literature
Legal academic commentators have, perhaps, noticed this case more than
the actual world of legal practice, although, again, the influence has been
relatively less than might be expected for the pioneering aspects of the case.
Twenty-one articles have cited the case in general discussions regarding
transgender rights, and nine have discussed it with respect to Blumenfeld's
statements regarding birth certificate sex changes and marriage rights. The
closest Darnell v. Lloyd has come to having any substantive impact,
however, has been in the esoteric universe of the interplay between
administrative and constitutional law. In the four decades plus since Darnell
was able to secure a birth certificate that reflected the reality of her post-
transition life, she does appear to be the only transsexual person to have
benefited directly from Blumenfeld's opinion.

In the realm of transgender legal history, Darnell v. Lloyd is an overlooked

Mudicial positive during an era in which the courts sent mixed messages that
many often misinterpret as a wholly negative reaction to transsexuality by
the US legal system. That view discounts the slow, yet steady, stream of
states enacting transsexual birth certificate statutes. Moreover, courts began
to accept challenges to anti–cross-dressing laws, government unwillingness
to fund transition-related health care, and state failure to recognize post-
transition marriage. On all fronts there were indeed negative court
decisions. However, except for employment discrimination, there also were
positive ones. Transsexuals seeking recognition of change of sex in state
courts in the absence of a birth certificate statute triggered many of the
negative decisions. However, Darnell's legal resistance to Connecticut's
administrative law decisions led to a federal court issuing the most positive
of the early transsexual birth certificate opinions.

SEE ALSO Argentina's Gender Identity Law; Transvestites/Transsexuals

BIBLIOGRAPHY
An Act Amending Certain Sections in Chapter IV of Title X of the
Government Code Relative to Vital Statistics. Territory of Guam (1980).

An Act Amending Sections 26-15-17 and 26-15-18, Utah Code Annotated

1953, as Enacted by Chapter 42, Laws of Utah 1953, as Amended by
Chapter 47, Laws of Utah 1965, Sections 35-1-92 and 35-2-46, Utah Code
Annotated 1953; and Enacting Section 26-15-16.5, Utah Code Annotated
1953; Relating to Vital Statistics; Providing for Amended Birth
Certificates for Persons with Name or Sex Changes; Providing for
Contents of Death Certificates; Providing for When the Medical Examiner
Must Certify a Death Certificate; and Providing Who May Authorize and
Perform Autopsies. State of Utah (1975).

An Act Concerning Vital Records. Public Act 01-163. State of Connecticut

(2001).

Advocate. “Supreme Court Upholds Drag Ban.” 24 April 1974, 10.

Barry, Kevin M., Brian Farrell, Jennifer L. Levi, and Neelima Vanguri.
“A Bare Desire to Harm: Transgender People and the Equal Protection
Clause.” Boston College Law Review 57, no. 2 (2016): 507–582.

Bellotti, Francis X. Massachusetts Attorney General opinion no. 62, 28

May 1975.
Bridgeport (CT) Telegram. “‘Diana’ Has Birth Certificate Altered Along
with Identity.” 18 August 1976.

Brown, Shana. “Sex Changes and ‘Opposite-Sex’ Marriage: Applying the

Full Faith and Credit Clause to Compel Interstate Recognition of
Transgendered Persons' Amended Legal Sex for Marital Purposes.” San
Diego Law Review 38, no. 4 (2001): 1113–1158.

Darnell v. Lloyd, 395 F. Supp. 1210 (D. Conn. 1975).

Fletcher, Katie D. “In re Marriage of Simmons: A Case for Transsexual

Marriage Recognition.” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 37, no. 3
(2006): 533–570.

Frye, Phyllis Randolph, and Katrina C. Rose. “Responsible Representation

of Your First Transgendered Client.” Texas Bar Journal 66, no. 7 (2003):
558–564.

Gaysweek. “Virginia Judge OKs New TS Birth Record.” 29 May 1978.

Greenberg, Julie A., and Marybeth Herald. “You Can't Take It with

You:
Constitutional Consequences of Interstate Gender-Identity Rulings.”
Washington Law Review 80, no. 4 (2005): 819–886.

Haider-Markel, Donald P., and Jami Taylor. “Two Steps Forward, One
Step Back: The Slow Forward Dance of LGBT Rights in America.” In
After Marriage Equality: The Future of LGBT Rights, edited by Carlos A.
Ball,
42–72. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Hartford (CT) Courant. “Point Won in Change of Gender.” 18 August

1976.

Holt, Kristine W. “Reevaluating Holloway: Title VII, Equal Protection, and

the Evolution of a Transgender Jurisprudence.” Temple Law Review 70, no.
1 (1997): 283–319.
Lang, Joel. “Transsexuals Look to City Clinic.” Hartford (CT) Courant, 1
June 1975.

Madeira, Jody Lyneé. “Law as a Reflection of Her/His-story: Current

Institutional Perceptions of, and Possibilities for, Protecting Transsexuals'
Interests in Legal Determinations of Sex.” University of Pennsylvania
Journal of Constitutional Law 5, no. 1 (2002): 128–185.

Markowitz, Stephanie. “Change of Sex Designation on Transsexuals' Birth

Certificates: Public Policy and Equal Protection.” Cardozo Journal of Law
and Gender 14, no. 3 (2008): 705–730.

Matambanadzo, Saru. “Engendering Sex: Birth Certificates, Biology, and

the Body in Anglo American Law.” Cardozo Journal of Law and Gender
12, no. 1 (2005): 213–245.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the

United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Rose, Katrina C. “The Transsexual and the Damage Done: The Fourth
Court of Appeals Opens PanDOMA's Box by Closing the Door on
Transsexuals' Right to Marry.” Law and Sexuality 9 (1999–2000): 1–134.

Rose, Katrina C. “When Is an Attempted Rape Not an Attempted Rape?

When the Victim Is a Transsexual: Schwenk v. Hartford; The Intersection
of Prison Rape, Title VII, and Societal Willingness to Dehumanize
Transsexuals.” American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and
the Law 9, no. 3 (2001): 505–540.

Rose, Katrina C. “The Proof Is in the History: The Louisiana Constitution

Recognises Transsexual Marriages and Louisiana Sex Discrimination Law
Covers Transsexuals—So Why Isn't Everybody Celebrating?” Deakin Law
Review 9, no. 2 (2004): 399–460.
Rose, Katrina C. “Is the Renaissance Still Alive in Michigan? Or Just
Extrinsic? Transsexuals' Rights after National Pride at Work.” Ohio
Northern University Law Review 35, no. 1 (2009): 107–154.

Rosky, Clifford J. “No Promo Hetero: Children's Right to Be Queer.”

Cardozo Law Review 35, no. 2 (2013): 425–510.

Smith, Douglas K. “Transsexualism, Sex Reassignment Surgery, and the

Law.” Cornell Law Review 56, no. 6 (1971): 963–1009.

Smith, Sharyn L. Florida Attorney General opinion no. 076-213, 10

November 1976.

Strasser, Mark. “Harvesting the Fruits of Gardiner: On Marriage, Public

Policy, and Fundamental Interests.” George Washington Law Review 71, no.
2 (2003): 179–230.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008.

Taylor, Jami K., Barry L. Tadlock, and Sarah Poggione. “State LGBT
Rights Policy Outliers: Transsexual Birth Certificate Amendment Laws.”
American Review of Politics 34 (Winter 2013–2014): 245–270.

Tierney, R. Joel, and Timothy M. O'Brien. “You're a Good Man Charlotte

Brown or What Now My Love?” Hennepin Lawyer, November 1968, 4–7.

Tobin, Harper Jean. “Against the Surgical Requirement for Change of Legal
Sex.” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 38, no. 2 (2006):
393–435.

Weiss, Jillian Todd. “The Gender Caste System: Identity, Privacy, and
Heteronormativity.” Law and Sexuality 10, no. 123 (2001): 123–186.

Witherspoon, Roger. “‘Medical Necessity’ Key in Sex-Change Court Case.”

Atlanta (GA) Constitution, 18 September 1980.
Zakaria, Teresa A. “By Any Other Name: Defining Male and Female in
Marriage Statutes.” Ave Maria Law Review 3, no. 1 (2005): 349–391.
Daughters of Bilitis
MARCIA M. GALLO
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The first women's organization in the United States to directly

address issues of female same-sex sexuality and gender.

The four lesbian couples who organized the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in
the mid-twentieth century could not have imagined the variety of gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities that would exist in
the twenty-first century. Yet the DOB provides a vital link between
yesterday and today. Founded in San Francisco in 1955, the Daughters of
Bilitis was the first women's organization in the United States to directly
address issues of female same-sex sexuality and gender. It helped develop
one of the most significant movements for social change: the gay and
lesbian civil rights movement. Through its leadership in the predominantly
male homophile (love of same) movement, the DOB provided first social
and then political involvement. The group's magazine (the Ladder), its
network of local chapters, and its series of public conventions throughout
the 1960s played crucial roles in creating lesbian identity, visibility,
institutions, and political strategies. The members of the DOB were part of
a tiny network of women and men in the post–World War II period that
began to question their lack of basic civil rights because of their choice of
sexual and romantic partners. As a result of their efforts, later movements
for gender and sexual equality developed in the 1970s and beyond.

The DOB was created by a small and racially diverse group of working-
and middle-class women, including Phyllis Lyon (1924–) and Del Martin
(1921–2008), who wanted to find a space to socialize with other lesbians in
San Francisco. The obscure name they chose for their new group—which
referenced a book of lesbian erotica first printed in the late nineteenth
century and reprinted in paperback in the early 1950s—reflected the
cautiousness of the mid-1950s. This was a time when gay people were Must
beginning to identify themselves, organize groups, and advocate for civil
rights despite severe social and political repression. By the early 1960s
there were DOB chapters in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and
chapters were added in more cities in the 1970s. Throughout the
organization's history, DOB members engaged in regular discussions—in
print and in person— about sex roles, gender conformity, gay marriage, and
raising children, to name some of the issues they took up, issues that are
still relevant in the twenty-first century. They used education, research, and
lobbying to influence personal attitudes, institutional policies, and social
practices regarding female homosexuality.
 © AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY
Phyllis Lyon (left) and Del Martin, Two of the Founders of the Daughters of Bilitis.
Lyon, Martin, and other lesbians created the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955 as the first
women's organization in the United States to directly address issues of female same-sex
sexuality and gender.

The Daughters often disagreed with one another about the best ways to
achieve their goals, but the one thing that they all agreed on was the
significance of providing safe spaces for lesbians. Whether they believed in
social services or social change as the essence of the group, whether they
were educators or organizers, athletes or intellectuals, former Daughters
describe the DOB first and foremost as providing a meeting place for
women.

They planned parties, picnics, potlucks, discussion groups, and public

meetings with psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, and politicians—all
nonthreatening ways to reach out to women who might want to Moin. They
welcomed anyone who wanted to learn about “the problem of the female
variant,” as they wrote in the statement of purpose printed in every issue of
their magazine.

The Ladder
The Daughters of Bilitis is renowned for creating the first ongoing monthly
magazine by and for lesbians, the Ladder, published from 1956 until 1972.
It provided a means of communication, debate, and political education for
women in the United States and internationally and promoted lesbian
writers, artists, and activists. It also inspired the development of similar
magazines. Envisioned as a recruitment tool when it began, the Ladder in
its first few years was written almost entirely by DOB members, typed by
volunteers, and copied in secret at night at someone's workplace, then
assembled and mailed in plain brown envelopes to friends and potential
allies. Despite its homemade appearance, it helped attract new members to
the DOB. At the same time, it added an important female voice to the small,
male-dominated homophile movement of the mid-1950s. During its sixteen
years of continuous publication, the Ladder became a respected site of
debate and analysis for the growing gay and lesbian movement while
expanding contemporary attitudes about lesbians. It always reflected
strongly pro-woman perspectives.

Working on the Ladder also provided a sense of purpose to the organization

as a whole. The production and distribution of the magazine was the central
activity of the Daughters and drew on the administrative skills of women in
the DOB's hometown of San Francisco, as well as in the group's larger
chapter cities. Starting in the mid-1960s, it also received regular $3,000
checks from a wealthy closeted supporter, which enabled the little magazine
to be professionally typeset and printed. During its final years, from 1968 to
1972, the Ladder was used to promote the ideas of the emerging feminist
movement and lesbian liberation.
The Ladder relied on the commitment of the five women editors who
guided its development during its sixteen years: Phyllis Lyon (1956–1960),
Del Martin (1960–1963), Barbara Gittings (1963–1966), Helen Sandoz
(1966–1968), and Barbara Grier (1968–1972). Each one left her particular
mark on the publication, expanding its scope and content, but all of them
disseminated information, helped the DOB appeal for funds and volunteers,
and reported on local and national developments in the lesbian and gay
movement.

Today, both the content within its pages and the images on the cover
provide researchers with tools to unearth the complexities of women's
organizing in the post–World War II period. The Ladder helps today's
readers understand that the 1950s was a complicated time not only of social
conformity and political repression but also of nascent civil rights struggles
that included gender and sexuality as well as race and economic status.
While the dominant media images of white women in the post–World War
II era may have emphasized domesticity, the reality of continuing female
employment outside the home and the increase in women who were seeking
college degrees meant that social norms were shifting toward gender
equality. As the African American playwright and civil rights activist
Lorraine Hansberry wrote to the Ladder in 1957, “I'm glad as heck that you
exist…. Women, like other oppressed groups of one kind or another, have
particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment that the
second class status imposed on us for centuries created and sustained. Thus,
I feel that The Ladder is a fine, elementary step in a rewarding direction”
(Ladder, May 1957, 26).

National Conventions
Starting in 1960 and continuing every two years for the next decade, the
DOB organized the first and only large public gatherings of lesbian activists
and their allies in the United States in that period. Their national
conventions were an impressive feat for a tiny, all-volunteer group.
Drawing anywhere from 100 to 300 women and men at each one, the DOB
conventions were held twice each in San Francisco and New York, as well
as in Los Angeles and Aurora, Colorado, near Denver. Each convention was
held in a hotel in a central location and featured speeches, parties, and at
least one gala event. Special awards, such as the “S.O.B. awards” (for
“Sons of Bilitis”), were given to men who had been helpful to the DOB.
National conventions also included a DOB business meeting, during which
delegates from the chapters voted on national officers and policy changes.
Voting lists of eligible members, proxies, and financial statements and
reports were carefully created by the national governing board and the
chapters for each gathering. In this way, the DOB consciously implemented
democratic structures and practices into its organizational work.

Perhaps most importantly, the national conventions provided unprecedented

opportunities to put the Daughters' faces and voices before the public. As
the 1960s progressed, and media interest in homosexuality increased, DOB
activists and lesbians in general saw their visibility climb as they were
“discovered” by talk-show hosts hungry for provocative and popular topics.
To promote their conventions, the Daughters sent press releases and
contacted the media in the host cities. Each of the conventions saw an
increase in local coverage from the one before. For example, the DOB's
1962 convention in Los Angeles resulted in television appearances by and
numerous interviews with DOB members that were used as the basis for a
best-selling 1964 nonfiction book, The Grapevine, by Jess Stearn. During
the DOB convention in New York City in 1964, the New York Times sent a
reporter to cover some of the sessions, leading to unprecedented publicity
for the organization. Whenever any of the group's members appeared in the
media, the response was immediate, with women contacting them for
information about the organization. The Daughters sharpened their abilities
to be interviewed by newspaper reporters, radio hosts, and television
personalities without being diminished or trivialized.
Their media appearances only increased as the decade went on. Many of the
Daughters, such as Gittings, Lyon, and Martin, became regular guests on
local, regional, and national talk shows. By then, however, Gittings was
putting her considerable writing and speaking skills to work on behalf of
the growing gay rights movement, while Lyon and Martin had moved on
from the DOB to the National Organization for Women and other new
groups promoting feminism. The growing militancy of both the gay and
feminist movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s influenced the DOB
in many ways, both positive and painful.

“If That's All There Is … ”

The Daughters of Bilitis officially disbanded as a national organization in
1970 after then-Ladder editor Barbara Grier and DOB president Rita
Laporte took the magazine and its mailing list away from the DOB and
began to publish it independently. They claimed that they did so to devote
the Ladder and its resources to the growing feminist movement. Many
Daughters, including Lyon and Martin, felt that the action to take the
magazine from the DOB amounted to a theft. However, among the first
articles published in the new Ladder was Martin's essay “If That's All There
Is,” which she used to document her break with the gay rights movement.

In August 1970, on the day of the first national Women's Strike for
Equality, Martin and other DOB members were Moined by two new gay
women's groups as they confronted the closing session of the North
American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO). NACHO
delegates had passed a resolution in support of women's liberation but also
stated their criticism of women-only groups. Martin was furious that the
NACHO “would not address themselves to the underlying reason for the
existence of separate women's organizations—that the female homosexual
faces sex discrimination not only in the heterosexual world, but within the
homophile community.” In her essay Martin condemned the “male
chauvinists of the homophile movement”; the “co-ed organizations” where
“women are invisible”; the “defense of washroom sex and pornographic
movies”; the “gay bars that discriminate against women”; and the “bastions
of male privilege,” including “male evangelists from two disparate worlds”
(Ladder, December/January 1970–1971, 4–6). Her powerful exposure of
sexism within the gay rights movement was an unmistakable call to action
for many lesbians.

In the early 1970s some lesbians answered the call and used the DOB and
the Ladder as sites for organizing lesbian feminist activism. Younger
leaders such as Jeanne Córdova in Los Angeles, Nina Kaiser in San
Francisco, and Martha Shelley in New York saw the potential that the
organization's resources, including its network of members and its well-
regarded magazine, provided, and they used them effectively. In addition, a
number of new DOB groups began and thrived for short periods, most of
them in large or medium-sized cities. In 1969, which is the same year as the
Stonewall riots in New York City that supposedly “started” the gay rights
revolution, a DOB chapter was founded in Melbourne as the first openly
gay organization in Australia. DOB Boston also was started in 1969 and
outlasted all other DOB groups; it remained active until 1995. During a
time of personal and political upheavals, the aim of the members of DOB
Boston was to provide a safe, social space for lesbians. In this way they
brought the Daughters of Bilitis full circle: from its first group to its last, the
DOB relied on social and educational events to bring women together.

The vision and commitment of the DOB provided a framework for lesbian
organizing and publishing from 1955 on. Through conscious use of media
and publicity and strategic collaborations with both gay male allies and
heterosexual women and men, the Daughters of Bilitis provided an
alternative universe of possibilities for lesbians where none previously had
existed.

SEE ALSO Boston Marriage and Women's Romantic Friendships; Combahee

River Collective; Dyketactics!; Lavender Menace
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bullough, Vern L., ed. Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian
Rights in Historical Context. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press,
2002.

Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: Dutton, 1993. Gallo, Marcia M.

Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of

Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. New York:

Carroll and Graf, 2006.

Grier, Barbara, and Coletta Reid, eds. The Lavender Herring: Lesbian
Essays from the “Ladder.” Baltimore: Diana Press, 1976.

Katz, Jonathan Ned, ed. The Ladder. Arno Series on Homosexuality. New
York: Arno Press, 1975. A bound reprint of the magazine's full run from
1956 to 1972.

Martin, Del, and Phyllis Lyon. Lesbian/Woman. Rev. ed. Volcano,

CA: Volcano Press, 1991.

Meeker, Martin. Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and

Community, 1940s–1970s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Defense of Marriage Act (1996)
AUSTIN C. EKLUND
PhD candidate
University at Albany, State University of New York

The passing and overturning of the US federal law essentially

banning same-sex marriage.

H.R. 3396, commonly known as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), was
a 1996 bill pertaining to same-sex marriage passed by the 104th US
Congress. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in the same year.
The law was divided into three sections. The first section amended the
federal Mudicial code to provide that no state or territory of the United States
that did not permit samesex marriages would be required to legally
acknowledge or enforce same-sex marriages that took place in other parts of
the United States that did permit same-sex marriages. The second section of
the law established federal definitions of “marriage” as a legal union
between one man and one woman as husband and wife and “spouse” as
only a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife. The third
section of the law absolved the federal government of responsibility to
recognize any marriages between same-sex partners for the purposes of
federal laws or programs, irrespective of the validity of those marriages in
the couples' home states. In effect, the Defense of Marriage Act blocked
same-sex married couples from federal rights, privileges, and protections
afforded by default to all heterosexual married couples.

Origins
In 1996 the executive branch of the US federal government was helmed by
President Bill Clinton (in office 1993–2001), a Democrat, while the
legislative branch, including the US Congress, was overwhelmingly
Republican. The Defense of Marriage Act was initially introduced by
Republican representative Bob Barr of Georgia in May 1996. The bill
passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 342–67. Republicans in
the House supported it by a margin of 224–1, while Democrats backed it by
a margin of 118–65. A similar landslide occurred in the Senate, where the
85–14 total vote saw all fifty-three Republicans voting for it and Democrats
voting for it by a margin of 32–14. At the time, both houses of Congress
were controlled by Republicans, and the maMority of “yes” votes was
significant enough to override a possible presidential veto. President
Clinton signed the bill into law on 21 September 1996.
 © SCOTT J. FERRELL/CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY/ALAMY
Republican Representative Bob Barr of Georgia. Barr initially introduced the bill
that would become the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.

From the time of the introduction of the Defense of Marriage Act, its
constitutionality has been fiercely debated by legal experts and politicians.
Traditionally, marriage and family law in the United States had been the
exclusive province of the states. The “full faith and credit” clause of the US
Constitution (Article IV, Section 1) was of special interest to both critics
and supporters of the law, as the clause requires all states to respect the
“public acts, records, and Mudicial proceedings of every other state,”
including for domestic and family-related matters. During the significant
civil rights changes of the mid-twentieth century, this clause of the
Constitution had not been cited to force states with antimiscegenation laws
to recognize interracial marriages, but it was then unclear whether or not the
clause would be applied with respect to same-sex marriages.

Social Context and Legal Precedent

Discussions about extending civil rights to gay and lesbian Americans long
predated the 1990s, when the Defense of Marriage Act was signed. In 1969
the gay rights movement was symbolically “born” when police conducted a
routine raid of a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Bar
patrons (including Marsha P. Johnson, a trans woman of color credited with
throwing the “first brick”) were frustrated by the persistent harassment and
assault they experienced at the hands of law enforcement and so fought
back during this raid in what became known as the Stonewall riots.
Emboldened by this event and by the national visibility of gay communities
that followed, a spate of similar events occurred at gay spaces in other cities
nationwide: members of queer communities publicly and proudly pushed
back against harassment and violence with demonstrations, protests, and
lawsuits, in addition to organizing politically.

The following year, in 1970, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell of

Minnesota became the first same-sex couple in the United States to apply
for a marriage license. Hennepin County reMected their application, and the
couple sued the state in Baker v. Nelson (1971), claiming a constitutional
right to marriage. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that its state law
limiting marriage to persons of the opposite sex did not violate the US
Constitution. Baker appealed the decision, but the US Supreme Court
dismissed the appeal “for want of a substantial federal question,” a rationale
generally used to describe a legal challenge that does not impress the
Mustices as sufficiently legally significant to warrant a full review. Because
the case was not granted certiorari, and instead came to the US Supreme
Court under a mandatory appellate review, its dismissal constituted a
decision on the merits and established Baker as precedent nationwide. Still,
several states, including Maryland, Virginia, and Florida, subsequently
passed statutes that specifically excluded same-sex couples from marriage.

A national discussion about same-sex unions in the United States came to

the fore in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis killed tens of thousands of gay
men, inviting questions about inheritance and death benefits for unmarried
couples. The AIDS crisis is also credited with changing public perceptions
of gay Americans, many of whom were galvanized by the crisis into
coming out and organizing politically. For example, in September 1989, the
influential State Bar Association of California urged recognition of
marriages between same-sex couples, citing “fundamental fairness” and
recommending a change in the California civil code to define marriage as a
“personal relation arising out of a civil contract between two people.” This
suggestion was ultimately symbolic, as the state's conservative Board of
Governors did not accept it, and same-sex marriage remained illegal in
California through the end of the twentieth century.

The first legally significant victory for same-sex marriage activists came in
1993 in the Hawaii case of Baehr v. Miike (1993), when three same-sex
couples sued the state of Hawaii after being denied a marriage license on
the grounds that they were in same-sex relationships. The Hawaii Supreme
Court ruled that the state's prohibition of same-sex marriage violated the
equal protection clause of the Hawaii Constitution because it discriminated
on the basis of sex. The court remanded the case to trial, requiring that
Hawaii prove a compelling government interest in prohibiting same-sex
marriages. The plaintiffs won their case in 1996, when it was determined
that Hawaii did not prove sufficient interest in maintaining the prohibition.
Shortly thereafter, the Hawaii legislature enacted a statute that exclusively
defined marriage as a union between heterosexual couples; simultaneously,
the state created the Commission on Sexual Orientation and the Law to
study the issue of granting certain benefits to same-sex couples. In 1997
Hawaii became the first US state to establish a registry for domestic
partnerships (called “reciprocal beneficiaries”) that extended some of the
same rights of married couples to unmarried couples. However, in 1998,
Hawaii voters passed a constitutional amendment barring same-sex couples
from the institution of marriage, which overrode the finding in Baehr.

Baehr was the first occasion on which a state supreme court ruled that
same-sex couples may be entitled to marriage rights. Although its original
legal determination applied only to the state of Hawaii, across the country
the ruling energized people who supported same-sex marriage and
discouraged those who opposed it. Both groups wondered if, under the
application of the full faith and credit clause of the US Constitution, other
states would be forced to recognize same-sex marriages performed in
Hawaii, creating a possible snowball effect. Thus, if Hawaii had begun to
recognize same-sex marriages as legal, other states might have been forced
to follow suit.

President Clinton and the Defense of

Marriage Act
President Clinton's response to the Defense of Marriage Act has been the
subMect of widespread discussion and debate. He signed the bill into law in
1996 after a long day of campaigning for reelection against Republican
opponent and then-Senate maMority leader Bob Dole. Social conservatives
were prone to oppose same-sex marriage and tended to vote for Republican
candidates by significant margins, and the Republican platform at that time
included vehement opposition to the extension of marriage rights to same-
sex couples.

During his first election bid in 1992, Clinton had been more transparent and
more aggressive in seeking votes from an increasingly organized gay
political caucus than any presidential candidate in history. At that time,
Republicans had controlled the White House for twelve years, and
significant criticism had been leveled against the administrations of Ronald
Reagan (1981–1989) and George H. W. Bush (1989–1993) for their neglect
in funding the battle against AIDS, which disproportionately affected gay
men. While governor of Arkansas, Clinton spoke at the first maMor
presidential campaign event for gay and lesbian supporters in West
Hollywood, California, delivering a stump speech focused heavily on the
AIDS crisis and the moral responsibility he saw to address it. “I have a
vision and you're a part of it,” he told the crowd of mostly gay and lesbian
attendees. “I believe we're all a part of the same community and we'd better
start behaving as if we are” (quoted in Socarides 2013). In his second term,
Clinton became the first president to officially address the Human Rights
Campaign, an organization devoted to equal rights for LGBT Americans,
and he also nominated James Hormel as the first openly gay ambassador in
US history.

However, some LGBT activists have argued that President Clinton's

“positive” relationship with gay and lesbian communities was inconsistent.
In 1993 President Clinton announced a policy that would tolerate
“homosexuals” in the military only if they remained silent about their
identities, or “closeted,” and stayed sexually inactive while serving.
Commonly referred to as “Don't Ask, Don't Tell,” but originally termed
“Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue,” the rule was designed to halt the
removal of service members from duty based solely on their sexual
orientation. While purportedly a measure to stop the indiscriminate firing of
gay people from the military, the policy was viewed by many supporters of
gay rights as an insufficient Compromise, even as the president was faced
with a Congress that was overwhelmingly against affording civil rights to
gay people inside or outside the armed forces. Raising further ire, following
his signing of the Defense of Marriage Act, Clinton's reelection campaign
broadcast ads on Christian radio stations in fifteen states boasting about it.
Following a swift backlash, the radio ad was pulled.

Still, Clinton's presidency is regarded as theretofore the most supportive of

LGBT equality in history. Nevertheless, throughout his reelection campaign
in 1996, he repeatedly stated that he defined marriage as a union of one man
and one woman. In the year of its signing, White House press secretary
Mike McCurry called the Defense of Marriage Act “gay baiting, pure and
simple,” and Clinton himself stated that the bill was “unnecessary ” and
“divisive” (quoted in Socarides 2013). One day before signing the bill into
law, President Clinton released a statement:

Throughout my life I have strenuously opposed discrimination

of any kind, including discrimination against gay and lesbian
Americans…. I have long opposed governmental recognition of
samegender marriages and this legislation is consistent with
that position…. I also want to make clear to all that the
enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and
at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to
provide an excuse for discrimination, violence or intimidation
against any person on the basis of sexual orientation.

(CLINTON 1996)

Unlike many other bills President Clinton signed, there were no cameras
present for the Defense of Marriage Act's signing, and no ceremony was
conducted.

Thirteen years later, in 2009, President Clinton publicly endorsed same-sex

marriage for the first time. In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper,
Clinton stated: “I realized that I was over sixty years old, I grew up at a
different time, and I was hung up about the word. I had all these gay
friends, I had all these gay couple friends, and I was hung up about it. And I
decided I was wrong…. I had an untenable position” (quoted in Socarides
2013).
President George W. Bush and Same-Sex
Marriage
In 2004, consistent with views shared by the maMority of elected officials in
his party, Republican president George W. Bush (2001–2009) expressed
support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in order to
“protect” marriage between a man and a woman, which he called “the most
fundamental institution of civilization” (quoted in Stout 2004). He urged
Congress to act on the amendment quickly, stating that a swift response
would preempt action from “activist Mudges” seeking to redefine marriage in
the United States by means of the full faith and credit clause of the
Constitution. “Those who want to change the meaning of marriage will
claim that this provision requires all states and cities to recognize same-sex
marriages performed anywhere in America,” the president said (PBS
NewsHour 2004).

In 2003 Massachusetts became the first US state to allow same-sex

marriage after its supreme court ruled that the state's ban violated the
constitutional rights of samesex couples. In 2004, like President Clinton at
the time of the Defense of Marriage Act's signing, Bush was running for
reelection. His Democratic opponent, then-senator John Kerry of
Massachusetts, publicly opposed gay marriage but also opposed Bush's
proposed amendment to the Constitution. Kerry was also publicly regarded
as flexible on issues pertaining to gays and lesbians because his state was
the first in the United States to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples.
 © MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
DOMA Plaintiff Edith “Edie” Windsor in 2013. In 2010 Windsor challenged the US
government's unwillingness to recognize her same-sex marriage under the Defense of
Marriage Act (DOMA) in its taxation of her late wife's estate. Her lawsuit resulted in
the US Supreme Court striking down DOMA in 2013 because it deprived same-sex
couples their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.

The Legal Challenge to the Defense of

Marriage Act
In 2013 the US Supreme Court was finally tasked with determining the
constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. Edith “Edie” Windsor and
Thea Spyer were a lesbian couple who, after forty years together, were
married in Canada in 2007. Two years later, Spyer died from complications
associated with multiple sclerosis. Even though their marriage was
recognized in the state of New York, where they had residency, Windsor,
as the sole executor of her wife's estate, was taxed on the inheritance by the
federal government as if she and Spyer were unmarried at the time of
Spyer's death. Under federal law, a spouse who dies can leave assets to the
other spouse without incurring taxes on the estate; because of section three
of the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor and Spyer's same-sex marriage
went unrecognized by the federal government, leaving Windsor with a tax
debt of over $363,000.

In 2010 Windsor sued the federal government seeking a refund of the estate
tax she was forced to pay. Windsor's lawsuit made national news and
received the enthusiastic support of the American Civil Liberties Union and
the New York Civil Liberties Union, two activist organizations that
challenge what they characterize as unnecessary government interference in
the lives of citizens. In part, Windsor's lawsuit alleged that section three of
the Defense of Marriage Act violated the equal protection clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution which guarantees equal
rights to all US citizens. The lawsuit also described “differential treatment”
for same-sex couples “compared to other similarly situated couples [as]
without Mustification” (quoted in Reilly 2017).

Nullification of the Defense of Marriage Act

In 2011 US attorney general Eric Holder announced that the Department of
Justice would not defend the constitutionality of section three of the
Defense of Marriage Act. Holder stated that he and President Barack
Obama (in office 2009–2017) concluded that classifications based on sexual
orientation, like those based on race and gender, warranted strict legal
scrutiny to ensure the absence of unfair discrimination, adding that section
three of the Defense of Marriage Act was “unconstitutional.” President
Obama was running for reelection the following year and, like his two
predecessors, his position on gay and lesbian issues became a means of
distinguishing himself from his opponent, Republican senator John McCain
of Arizona.

Throughout his first campaign and first term in office, Obama had been
more clearly and openly supportive of civil rights for LGBT people than
any other president. For example, in 2008 Obama pledged to repeal the
Defense of Marriage Act. In 2009 he signed the Matthew Shepard and
James Byrd Jr. Act, which offered the Justice Department Murisdiction over
violent crimes in which a victim has been selected because of sexual
orientation, among other demographic characteristics. In 2010 he signed a
bill repealing the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy.

Theretofore, President Obama had repeatedly and publicly stated that he

supported civil unions and other nonmarital partnerships for same-sex
couples, some of which afforded them similar rights as full-fledged
marriage. In 2012, the year of his reelection campaign, he became the first
sitting president to express support for same-sex marriage. Obama
subsequently won reelection by handy margins.

In 2013, in a reversal described as highly unusual, the former president

Clinton penned an editorial in the Washington Post in which he publicly
called the Defense of Marriage Act “discriminatory” and unconstitutional
and urged the US Supreme Court, at that time tasked with determining its
constitutionality, to overturn it. He stated:

We are still a young country, and many of our landmark

civil rights decisions are fresh enough that the voices of
their champions still echo, even as the world that preceded
them becomes less and less familiar. We have yet to
celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, but a
society that denied women the vote would seem to us now
not unusual or old- fashioned but alien. I believe that in
2013 DOMA and
 opposition to marriage equality are vestiges of Must such an
unfamiliar society.

(CLINTON 2013)

In a five–four decision by the US Supreme Court, Edie Windsor won her

case against the federal government, and section three of the Defense of
Marriage Act was deemed unconstitutional, based on the ruling that it
deprived samesex couples of their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment
to the US Constitution. The court also held that states, not the federal
government, have the authority to define marital relationships, and that the
federal government's interference in marriage defied legislative and
historical precedent. The maMority opinion in the Windsor case was written
by Justice Anthony Kennedy, widely regarded as the US Supreme Court's
“swing vote,” and was Moined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen
Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Along ideological lines, Chief
Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and
Samuel Alito dissented. From the maMority opinion:

The class to which DOMA directs its restrictions and

restraints are those persons who are Moined in same-sex
marriages made lawful by the State. DOMA singles out a class
of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and
protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability
on the class
by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be
dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and
indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact,
including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy
than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for
no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to
 disparage and to inMure those whom the State, by its marriage
laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.

(UNITED STATES V. WINDSOR 2013)

Subsequent Marriage Ruling

Still, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act did not fully extend
marriage rights to same-sex couples across the country. Gay marriage was
legalized nationwide two years later in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), when
groups of same-sex couples sued their respective state agencies in
Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio and challenged the
constitutionality of their states' bans on same-sex marriage, or their states'
failure to recognize the legality of same-sex marriages conducted in other
states. The plaintiffs claimed that, similar to the charges of Windsor's
lawsuit over the Defense of Marriage Act, their rights under the Fourteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution were violated by disparate treatment on
the basis of sex.

The US Supreme Court, in another five–four decision, ruled in the

plaintiffs' favor, arguing that the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry. Judicial
precedent has held that marriage is a fundamental liberty because it pertains
to individual autonomy, protects an intimate association between two
people, safeguards children and families, and is a cornerstone of social and
cultural order. Like Windsor, the maMority opinion in Obergefell was written
by Justice Kennedy and Moined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor,
and Kagan. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito
again dissented. From the maMority opinion:
 The class to which DOMA directs its restrictions and
restraints are those persons who are Moined in same-sex
marriages made lawful by the State. DOMA singles out a class
of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and
protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability
on the class
by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be
dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and
indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact,
including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy
than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for
no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to
disparage and to inMure those whom the State, by its marriage
laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.

(UNITED STATES V. WINDSOR 2013)

Since the decisions in Windsor and Obergefell, hundreds of thousands of

same-sex marriages have been conducted nationwide.

SEE ALSO HIV/AIDS in the United States; Human Rights Campaign;

Marches on Washington; Marriage, Same-Sex, in Latin America;
Marriage, Same-Sex, in Taiwan; Marriage, Universal, in Europe; Military
Law and Policy in the United States

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Peter. “Now in Defense of Gay Marriage, Bill Clinton.” New York
Times, 26 March 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/us/politics/bill-
clintons-decision-and-regret-on -defense-of-marriage-act.html
Baehr v. Miike. 1996/1999. Lambda Legal. https://www.lambdalegal.org/in-
court/cases/baehr-v-miike

Clinton, Bill. “President's Statement on DOMA.” Carnegie Mellon

University, 20 September 1996.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/scotts/ftp/wpaf2mc/clinton.html

Clinton, Bill. “Bill Clinton: It's Time to Overturn DOMA.” Washington

Post, 7 March 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bill-
clinton-its-time-to-overturn-doma/2013/03/07/fc184408-8747-11e2-98a3-
b3db6b9ac586_story.html?utm_term=.47097c0a9962

“The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Call for a Constitutional
Amendment.” Accessed on 22 August 2018. FindLaw.
http://family.findlaw.com/marriage/the-defense-of-marriage-act-and-the-
call-for-a-constitutional.html

Denniston, Lyle. “Gay Marriage and Baker v. Nelson.” SCO-TUSblog, 4

July 2012. http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/07/gay-marriage-and-baker-v-
nelson/

“Factbox: List of States that Legalized Gay Marriage.” Reuters, 26 June

2013. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gaymarriage-
states/factbox-list-of-states-that-legalized-gay-marriage-
idUSBRE95P07A20130626

Horvitz, Paul F. “‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue’ Is White House's
Compromise Solution: New U.S. Military Policy Tolerates Homosexuals.”
New York Times, 20 July 1993.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/20/news/20iht-gay_1.html

Langdon, Joshua R. “12 Historical Events that Helped Shape Same-Sex

Marriage Law.” Ohio State Bar Association News, 7 June 2016.
https://www.ohiobar.org/NewsAndPublications/News/OSBANews/Pages/1
2-historical-events-that-helped-shape-same-sex-marriage-law.aspx

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. (2015). Justia: US Supreme Court.

https://supreme.Mustia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/opinion3.html

PBS NewsHour. “The Defense of Marriage Act.” 30 April 2004.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/law-Man-Mune04-doma_04-30

Peralta, Eyder. “Court Overturns DOMA, Sidesteps Broad Gay Marriage

Ruling.” NPR, 26 June 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2013/06/26/195857796/supreme-court-strikes-down-defense-of-
marriage-act

Picard, André. “How the Advent of AIDS Advanced Gay Rights.” Globe
and Mail, 15 August 2014. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-
and-fitness/health/how-the-advent-of-aids-advanced-gay-
rights/article20083869/

Reilly, Mollie. “Edith Windsor, Plaintiff in Landmark Same-Sex Marriage

Case, Dies.” Huffington Post, 12 September 2017.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/edith-windsor-
dead_us_59b83981e4b02da0e13d0eaa

Rudin, Ken. “Gay Marriage, DOMA, and the Dramatic Shift in Public
Opinion in One Year.” NPR, 18 March 2013.
https://www.npr.org/sections/politicalMunkie/2013/03/18/173970922/gay-
marriage-doma-and-the-dramatic-shift-in-public-opinion-in-one-year

Socarides, Richard. “Why Bill Clinton Signed the Defense of Marriage

Act.” New Yorker, 8 March 2013.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news- desk/why-bill-clinton-signed-the-
defense-of-marriage-act

Steinmetz, Katy. “See Obama's 20-Year Evolution on LGBT Rights.” Time,

10 April 2015. http://time.com/3816952/obama-gay-lesbian-transgender-
lgbt-rights/

Stout, David. “Bush Backs Ban in Constitution on Gay Marriage.” New

York Times, 24 February 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/24/politics/bush-backs-ban-in-
constitution-on-gay-marriage.html

United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. (2013). Justia: US Supreme Court.

https://supreme.Mustia.com/cases/federal/us/570/12-307/opinion3.html

Windsor v. United States. ACLU, 25 April 2014.

https://www.aclu.org/cases/lesbian-and-gay-rights/windsor-v-united-states

Yglesias, Matthew. “Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Defense of Marriage
Act, Explained.” Vox, 30 October 2015. https://www.vox.com/policy-
and- politics/2015/10/30/9642602/clinton-doma-constitutional-
amendment
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM)
LISA DOWNING
Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

The history of the classification of nonnormative sexual

behaviors and identities in the diagnostic manual of the
American Psychiatric Association.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),

published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), presents a
classification of recognized mental disorders. It is used in the United States
as a diagnostic tool by clinicians and affects the insurance and
pharmaceutical industries, because insurance companies will refer to its
diagnostic schema when making decisions about which claims for treatment
they will cover. Even though the International Classification of Diseases
(ICD) is designed for international use, as the name would suggest, while
the DSM is primarily intended for domestic US use, the DSM also has
considerable global influence (Clark et al. 2017). For example, many parts
of the world rely on the DSM to diagnose mental illness and to classify and
track “epidemics” of poor mental health (Stein, Lund, and Nesse 2013),
even though the deep divergence in acceptable cultural norms of behavior
found in different parts of the world renders the idea of a universal
psychiatry problematic (Landman 2013). In particular, the inclusion of
sexuality- and gender-related conditions as mental disorders in the DSM has
been the subMect of long-standing controversy, often opposed by some
critically minded medical doctors and psychiatrists, such as Charles Moser;
by academics working in gender and sexuality studies from humanities and
social sciences perspectives; and by LGBTQI+ activists, who see these as
matters of identity rather than illness.

The different editions of the DSM (to date, five main editions, two followed
by “revised” versions, and spanning more than half a century from 1952 to
2013) have, to some degree, reflected the changing Western social and
cultural attitudes toward sexual practice, orientation, and gender identity
throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in their formulations of
sexuality and gender-related diagnoses (Perone 2014). Homosexuality was
“diagnosed” as a pathology in 1952, but all mentions of it were entirely
removed by 1987. The “paraphilias” (the preferred APA term for
“perversions” after DSM-II) were depathologized in 2013, such that only
“paraphilic disorders,” where the unusual sexual stimulus is a source of
“dysphoria” (emotional/psychological discomfort), remained as mental
disorders in DSM-5 (Downing 2015). Along similar lines, “transsexualism,”
which appeared in DSM-III (1980), was removed in DSM-5 (2013), such
that only “gender dysphoria” remains, although this diagnosis is often a
requirement for trans people to access therapies and surgeries in the United
States and elsewhere. And, whereas DSM-IV included “interpersonal
distress” as a proper cause for diagnosing hypoactive sexual desire disorder
(i.e., the possibility that a husband who was unhappy with his wife's lower
libido could lead to that wife officially being classified as mentally ill), by
the time of the publication of DSM-5, only dysphoria felt by the person with
the disorder of sexual desire would qualify them for the diagnosis. The
pattern that emerges, then, is a move from deviations from the norm—what
Gayle S. Rubin terms instances of “benign variation” (1984)—being
perceived as a problem for others and for society at large, and
concomitantly pathologized, toward these variations falling within the
definition of a mental disorder only if they cause distress to the person in
question. The case of intersex conditions, however, is perhaps an exception
to this broad trend, as many see the renaming of “intersex” as “disorders of
sex development” in DSM-5 as an intensification of the pathologization of
intersexed people.
The broad parallel traMectories of destigmatization of a phenomenon in
Western society at large and depathologization of it in the history of the
DSM points up the degree to which political ideology and cultural taste
intersect with and influence medical science. It confirms the perspectives of
historians such as Ian Hacking, who argue, after the influential French
historian and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984), that diagnoses are
culturally and historically contingent tools for establishing and policing
regulatory norms of behavior and that shifts in diagnostic categories
therefore map onto and reveal broader shifts in cultural attitudes (Hacking
2006).

Homosexuality and Its Vicissitudes

The sexuality diagnoses (homosexuality and “sexual deviations” or
“perversions”) in the first (1952) edition of the DSM were heavily
influenced by American psychoanalysts. However, unlike the founder of
psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who argued for the existence
of universal primary bisexuality, such that homosexuals were seen to be
suffering from “arrested development” but not from mental illness or moral
degeneracy, the APA's version of psychoanalytic thought, influenced by
Sandor Rado (1890–1972), a Hungarian émigré to the United States,
understood homosexuality as a pathology and more specifically as the
“‘phobic’ avoidance of the other sex” (Drescher 2015, 569). In DSM-I,
then, homosexuality appears as a “sociopathic personality disturbance,”
whereas, by 1968, with the publication of DSM-II, it had been reclassified
as one of the “sexual deviations” or perversions. In later years, however,
psychiatry would branch off from psychoanalytic concepts and thinking and
would move also toward a more nuanced understanding of sexuality. The
controversial work of Alfred C. Kinsey (1894–1956) in the 1950s was
crucial in contributing a qualitative understanding of the “spectrum” of
sexuality and pushing psychiatrists—however suspicious many of them
were of Kinsey's methods and findings—to reevaluate their understanding
of homosexuality (Chiang 2008). This was further underpinned by the
pioneering insights of the psychologist Evelyn Hooker (1907–1996), whose
work led to the weakening of the assumed link between homosexuality and
mental illness. The influence of nonconformist scientists and doctors,
alongside activist groups, cannot be overstated in understanding the
changes that would occur.

In the early 1970s, with the Stonewall riots having marked the turn of the
decade in 1969, psychiatric circles held discussions regarding the
appropriateness of continuing to consider homosexuality as a mental
disorder at all (Martos, Wilson, and Meyer 2017; Kunzel 2017). Lesbian
and gay activists disrupted the APA's annual meetings in both 1970 and
1971, identifying the continued pathologization of homosexuality as a
maMor contributing factor in negative social attitudes toward lesbians and
gay men (Stoller et al. 1973). In 1972 John Fryer, a gay psychiatrist, Moined
activists at the annual meeting, appearing anonymously to talk about the
difficulties of being a homosexual psychiatrist and the stigma and silence of
those like him (Drescher 2015). A symposium was held at the 1973 APA
annual meeting to debate the question: “Should homosexuality be in the
APA nomenclature?” This followed research led by Robert Spitzer, who
questioned whether conditions that did not cause distress to those
presenting with them should still be considered mental disorders. He
concluded that absence of dysphoria was a reasonable criterion for removal
of a condition from the DSM and that homosexuality was, for the most part,
such a condition. After evaluating the evidence of Spitzer's group, along
with other evidence presented, the APA members voted by a small maMority
to remove the diagnosis of homosexuality from the DSM.

However, DSM-II would contain a new diagnosis, “sexual orientation

disturbance,” which would transform into “ego-dystonic homosexuality” in
DSM-III (1980). These diagnoses considered persons to be suffering from a
mental illness as a result of their homosexuality only if their orientation
caused them significant distress. These caveat diagnoses were entirely
dropped from DSM-III-R (1987). This decision was eminently reasonable
because many would argue that, although somewhat destigmatized by 1980
in the West, continuing social oppression of, and preMudice against, gay and
bisexual people may reasonably account for their feeling unhappy, without
their sexuality itself being a factor in causing mental ill health. Yet, despite
the APA's eventual acceptance of the possibility of healthy homosexuality,
in the American psychoanalytic community the tendency to pathologize
nonheterosexual sexuality did not disappear, and many lamented its
removal from the DSM. Writing as late as 1995, the socially conservative
psychoanalyst Charles W. Socarides dubbed homosexuality “a freedom too
far” in his politically reactionary account of the impact of gay liberation on
American society (Socarides 1995).

Transforming the Trans Diagnoses

Understandings of gender identities and sexual orientations are not easily
separated from each other in the medicolegal history of sexuality. For Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), a German lawyer and early gay rights
activist whose theory of homosexuality was very influential in the 1840s
and 1850s, an “Urning” (the name Ulrichs gave to a homosexual) was a
person with the soul of one sex trapped in the body of another, thereby
creating a very heterosexual logic for homosexual desire. This also
describes one understanding, and one narrative, of “transsexuality” that held
sway in the twentieth century—that of the dysphoria experienced by a
person “born in the wrong body.” More recent understandings of trans
identities among some trans activists and LGBTQI+ communities, however,
reMect the notion of dysphoria being a necessary factor in trans experience,
and the medical establishment has moved gradually in the direction of
depathologization. Yet, in certain cultural and historical contexts where
homophobia is prevalent, the “trans-ing” of individuals offers an effective
way of suppressing homosexuality and enforcing normative gender roles. In
Iran in the twenty-first century, homosexuality is prohibited by the
theocratic state, but the country hosts more sex reassignment surgeries (i.e.,
gender confirmation surgery) than any nation besides Thailand (Drescher
2010a). This situation leads some, including trans women and men
themselves, to see homosexuality as a “willed deviation” and may
encourage gender-nonconforming people to identify as trans (NaMmabadi
2014, 250). In the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, medical experts
such as the psychiatrist Richard Green (1936–) were concerned that patients
presenting with transsexualism were “really” homosexuals. In order to be
allowed access to sex reassignment surgery, a trans person was expected to
express disgust at the idea of homosexual sex and to declare an entire
absence of sexual desire (Valentine 2007). Both homophobia and a lack of
respect for trans people and their experience as fully desiring human beings,
then, permeate and shape the history of trans diagnoses.

In the case of the DSM, “transsexualism” and “gender identity disorder of

childhood” were first included in DSM-III (1980), in large part in response
to the influential work of the sexologists and psychiatrists John Money
(1921–2006), Harry BenMamin (1885–1986), Robert J. Stoller (1924–1991),
and Green, who set up gender clinics in the United States, where, between
the 1950s and 1980s, they provided therapeutic and surgical treatment for
those presenting with gender-nonconforming behavior, gender dysphoria,
and the expressed desire for surgery. The high-profile case of Christine
Jorgensen (1926–1989) in the 1950s brought media attention to the subMect
of transsexualism, partly because Jorgensen was a rare “out” trans person
with financial power and social influence and partly as a result of her
doctors publishing their account of her treatment (Meyerowitz 2002). The
silence on the part of the APA on the subMect of trans until 1980 has been
explained as being the result of an unwillingness to recognize the efficacy
of surgical treatment, in part owing to the psychoanalytically informed
perception that gender dysphoria was a neurotic or psychotic delusion that
should be “cured” using talking therapy (Drescher 2010a). However, even
as early as the 1950s, when BenMamin was first beginning to crystallize the
concept of transsexualism, he would recommend that his patients should
consult with mental health experts before undertaking surgical
transformations.
Moves to replace “gender identity disorder” with “gender dysphoria” for
DSM-5 (2013) were much discussed and debated by the APA in the
consultation period prior to publication. Considerations included the
perceived danger of stigmatizing an already vulnerable group further by
considering their very identity as a mental illness. This was weighed against
the concern that depathologization might lead to the withdrawal of medical
support by insurers for trans people seeking hormonal and surgical
interventions (Drescher 2010a). Lance Wahlert and Sabrina Gill (2017), in
fact, point out that the “gender dysphoria” diagnosis in essence means that
trans people in the United States may be considered ill enough to be
diagnosed with a mental disorder but simultaneously be excluded from
protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Finally, concerns
regarding the treatment of trans youth centered on critiques of clinical
practice aimed at attempting to persuade gender-nonconforming children to
reMect their gender identity and accept instead to live as their natal sex,
which was seen as a cruel form of “reparative therapy” by some activists
(Drescher 2010a).

Broadly, however, despite the potential disadvantages to some trans people

of the partial demedicalization noted previously, the change in the trans
diagnosis in the DSM parallels closely trends in trans activism. These
include the broadening of the “trans umbrella” to include a spectrum of
gender fluidity, as well as agender and nonbinary identifications. The main
UK-based LGBTQI+ organization, Stonewall UK (2018), insists on this
inclusive definition, and the work of activist-academics such as Alex
Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker (2017) has popularized the notions of a
gender spectrum and a “gender Mourney.” Such moves have signaled a break
from the binary “crossing” metaphor on which the idea of “trans” was
originally founded (Denny 2002). This definitional shift in the direction of
activism is also echoed legislatively by a move away from a medical and
legal gatekeeping process (that still includes coerced sterilization in many
places) and toward a process of self-identification in a number of national
contexts. These include, as of 2018, Argentina, Colombia, Denmark,
Ireland, Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Canada, with a proposed similar change
under discussion in the United Kingdom as well.

When Absence Equals Illness: The Disorders

of Sexual Desire
The means of pathologizing nonnormative sexuality throughout history has
largely been a matter of measuring the distance from a norm in terms of
obMect (same-sex desire rather than opposite-sex desire), act (some
preferred perverse alternative to reproductive heterosexual intercourse), or
quantity of desire (too much or too little). As Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
(2011) have shown, discourses of “frigidity” in the nineteenth century,
habitually ascribed to women, reflected sexist assumptions about the
“appropriate” amount of desire women were supposed to feel. The
nineteenth-century medical view held that women were naturally endowed
with a lower libido than men; were it not so, the Austro-German forensic
psychiatrist and father of sexology Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902)
argues, “the whole world would become a brothel” (1893, 13). Yet, men
also expected their wives to experience a sufficiency of desire and passion
for their husbands, to be expressed, self-evidently, only within the confines
of the marital bed, such that too much “coldness” was also presented as a
problem to be solved (Cott 1978; Jeffreys 1985).

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the misogynistic discourse of

frigidity took on different forms, transmogrifying into the actively chosen
identity of asexuality—or “ace” in activist community terms—and into
“female sexual interest/arousal disorder” in the language of DSM-IV.
Unlike the discourse of frigidity it replaced, however, a male counterpart
also exists in the APA's classification: “male hypoactive sexual desire
disorder.”

Similar to what has been observed in the cases of samesex desire and trans
identity, the incremental DSM depathologization in the case of the disorders
of sexual desire follows the emergence of a branch of identity politics and
the advocacy of a pressure group, often spearheaded or supported by
sympathetic medical allies. The sex researcher Lori A. Brotto and her team
at the University of British Columbia have argued for asexuality having the
status of an orientation, rather than that of a paraphilia or disorder (Brotto
and Yule 2017). And concomitantly, in DSM-5, unlike in DSM-IV, it is
indicated that these diagnoses may not be applied if the person presenting
reports never having experienced sexual desire at all, such that the identity
of “asexual” becomes a mitigating factor in classification. (Yet, given that
some asexual-identified people report experiencing a degree of sexual
attraction or desire in certain circumstances, the APA exception appears to
be a rather blunt tool, suggesting that only the “approved” type of asexual
person is “excused” a diagnosis.) The broader point, however, remains:
where the discourse of “identity” gains sufficient traction, the diagnostic
imperative of mental illness becomes more flexible.

Intersex or “Disorders of Sex Development”:

An Exception to the Trend?
The medical establishment defines intersex conditions as congenital and
chromosomal deviations from typical sex characteristics. For some intersex
activists, however, these conditions are defined as “variations” in bodily
morphology and therefore as not pathological (Inter 2015). Organized
intersex activism began in the 1990s, when several national groups were
established, including the (now defunct) Intersex Society of North America,
founded by the high-profile intersex activist Cheryl Chase/Bo Laurent.
Much activism focused in the 1990s, and continues to focus today, on the
demedicalization of these conditions and against the enforcement of sex-
determining surgery in infancy. Intersex advocacy has been influential in
debates on human rights and bodily autonomy; for example, in 2013, the
United Nations' Committee Against Torture looked into the impact of early
genital surgery in Switzerland, China, and Hong Kong (Carpenter 2016).
More recently, as in discussions of transgender rights, some intersex
activists have argued that intersex individuals should have the option to
self-affirm as women, as men, as nonbinary, as another gender identity, or
as none at all (Carpenter 2016).

The case of intersex, then, reveals a similar tension between pathologization

(intersex understood as deviation) and depathologization (intersex
understood as benign variation, accompanied by calls for the move to self-
identification) to that which has been seen in the cases of sexual orientation,
gender identity, and lack of sexual desire. However, the narrative of a
movement toward a gradual and partial depathologization of these
phenomena on the part of APA is not echoed neatly in the case of intersex.
Indeed, some see the APA, in tandem with other American medical
organizations, as having, over time, reinforced and deepened the
understanding of intersex as an illness. In the first decade of the twenty-first
century, the North American medical establishment, including the
American Academy of Pediatrics, renamed “intersex conditions” as
“disorders of sex development” (DSD). The APA officially adopted this
nomenclature in DSM-5 (2013). Activists such as Cheryl Chase
vociferously opposed the introduction of the DSD terminology in
endocrinology and psychiatry, because the language of disorder is arguably
more pathologizing than the term intersex, as it suggests the need for
medical (surgical) intervention and (psychiatric) regulation. The gender
studies scholar Cynthia Kraus (2015) considered the move made within
DSM-5 unhelpful, as it additionally reframed DSD as a specifier of gender
dysphoria. This marked a departure from earlier editions of the DSM, where
intersex was, in fact, an exclusion criterion for gender identity disorder.
Kraus argues that this conflation detracts from the specific needs and
experiences of both trans and intersexed individuals, while further
pathologizing intersexed patients by giving them a second diagnosis.

It is also significant to note that the American medical establishment's

naming of DSD is the end point of a normalizing, colonializing process
whereby Western understandings of “correct” bodies and binary gender are
coercively applied to other cultures that have long recognized “third sexes”
or a spectrum of intersex variations without attempting to “normalize”
them. Scholars such as Paula Gunn Allen (1986) have pointed out that
Eurocentric and medicalized norms have long been imposed on non-
Western cultural understandings of sex and gender in this way.

Some Concluding Remarks

The APA has largely adapted—sometimes slowly, partially, and reluctantly
—to trends toward social liberalization, thanks in large part to the
significant influence of LGBTQI+ activism in the United States and the
broader Western world. However, the use of the DSM globally as a tool for
diagnosis and social categorization, as well as its potential to measure
regressive attitudes toward LGBTQI+ people in parts of the world that still
discriminate against them legally and culturally, should not be overlooked.
In their analysis of the challenges of using the DSM for global
understandings of mental health, Dan J. Stein, Crick Lund, and Randolph
M. Nesse suggest that “a global mental health classification” would be
preferable to the current DSM or ICD, as this “might also highlight societal-
level risk and protective factors” (2013, 496). Stein, Lund, and Nesse use
the example of depression, which has different cultural manifestations and
meanings across the globe. However, the example of the sexuality and
gender diagnoses are even more pertinent, as sexual orientation and gender
identity are located at the intersection of cultural beliefs and exercises of
power, psychological and emotional experience, and public health. There
are also serious financial implications in the DSM's homeland of the United
States regarding the inclusion or exclusion of sexual and gender diagnoses.
The Food and Drug Administration's approval of the drug flibanserin (sold
under the brand name Addyi) for the treatment of female sexual
interest/arousal disorder in 2015, for example, makes the continuing
existence of that diagnosis a matter of financial interest to the
pharmaceutical industry. Such examples as these reveal the extent to which
the DSM continues to be a locus and tool of political, fiscal, and regulatory
power, even as its contents are influenced and shaped by the winds of social
change.

SEE ALSO Asexuality; Ethnopsychiatry; Psychoanalysis in Argentina

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in
American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders (DSM-I). Washington, DC: Author, 1952.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders. 2nd ed. (DSM-II). Washington, DC: Author, 1968.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders. 3rd ed. (DSM-III). Washington, DC: Author, 1980.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders: DSM-III-R. 3rd ed., rev. Washington, DC: Author, 1987.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders: DSM-IV. 4th ed. Washington, DC: Author, 1994.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR. 4th ed., text revision. Washington, DC:
Author, 2000.

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders: DSM-5. 5th ed. Arlington, VA: Author, 2013.

Bayer, Ronald. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of

Diagnosis. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
Brotto, Lori A., and Morag Yule. “Asexuality: Sexual Orientation,
Paraphilia, Sexual Dysfunction, or None of the Above?” Archives of Sexual
Behavior 46, no. 3 (2017): 619–627.

Carpenter, Morgan. “The Human Rights of Intersex People: Addressing

Harmful Practices and Rhetoric of Change.” Reproductive Health Matters
24, no. 47 (2016): 74–84.

Chiang, Howard Hseuh-Hao. “Effecting Science, Affecting Medicine:

Homosexuality, the Kinsey Reports, and the Contested Boundaries of
Psychopathology in the United States, 1948–1965.” Journal of the History
of the Behavioral Sciences 44, no. 4 (2008): 300–318.

Clark, Lee Anna, Bruce Cuthbert, Roberto Lewis-Fernández, et al. “Three

Approaches to Understanding and Classifying Mental Disorder: ICD-11,
DSM-5, and the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain
Criteria (RDoC).” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 18, no. 2
(2017): 72–145.

Cott, Nancy F. “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual

Ideology, 1790–1850.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
4, no. 2 (1978): 219–236.

Cryle, Peter, and Alison Moore. Frigidity: An Intellectual History.

Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Denny, Dallas. “A Selective Bibliography of Transsexualism.” Journal of

Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy 6, no. 2 (2002): 35–66.

Downing, Lisa. “Heteronormativity and Repronormativity in Sexological

‘Perversion Theory’ and the DSM-5's ‘Paraphilic Disorder’ Diagnoses.”
Archives of Sexual Behavior 44, no. 5 (2015): 1139–1145.

Drescher, Jack. “Queer Diagnoses: Parallels and Contrasts in the History of

Homosexuality, Gender Variance, and the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 39, no. 2 (2010a): 427–460.

Drescher, Jack. “Transsexualism, Gender Identity Disorder, and the

DSM.” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health 14, no. 2 (2010b): 109–
122.

Drescher, Jack. “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality.”

Behavioral Sciences 5, no. 4 (2015): 565–575.

Hacking, Ian. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” The Tenth British

Academy Lecture, British Academy, 11 April 2006.
https://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/hacking-draft.pdf

Iantaffi, Alex, and Meg-John Barker. How to Understand Your Gender:

A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are. London: Jessica Kingsley,
2017.

Inter, Laura. “¿Qué es la Intersexualidad?” [What is intersexuality?].

BrúMula intersexual: Punto de encontro para personas intersexuales (blog),
19 January 2015. https://www.bruMulaintersexual.org/2015/01/19/que-es-la-
intersexualidad/

Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality,
1880–1930. London: Pandora Press, 1985.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia sexualis, with Especial Reference

to Contrary Sexual Instincts: A Clinical Forensic Study. Translated by
Charles Gilbert Chaddock (from the 7th German edition). Philadelphia: F.
A. Davis, 1893. First published in German 1886.

Kraus, Cynthia. “Classifying Intersex in DSM-5: Critical Reflections on

Gender Dysphoria.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 44, no. 5 (2015): 1147–
1163.

Kunzel, Regina. “Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health.”
American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 315–319.
Landman, Patrick. Tristesse Business: Le scandale du DSM-5. Paris: Max
Milo, 2013.

Martos, Alexander J., Patrick A. Wilson, and Ilan H. Meyer. “Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Health Sciences in the United States:
Origins, Evolution, and Contemporary Landscape.” PLoS ONE 12, no. 7
(2017): e0180544. doi:10.1371/Mournal.pone.0180544.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the

United States. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

NaMmabadi, Afsaneh. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex

Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Perone, Angela K. “The Social Construction of Mental Illness for Lesbian,

Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Persons in the United States.” Qualitative
Social Work 13, no. 6 (2014): 766–771.

Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics
of Sexuality.” In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, edited
by Carole S. Vance, 267–319. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.

Socarides, Charles W. Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far; A

Psychoanalyst Answers 1000 Questions about Causes and Cure and the
Impact of the Gay Rights Movement on American Society. Phoenix, AZ:
Adam Margrave Books, 1995.

Stein, Dan J., Crick Lund, and Randolph M. Nesse. “Classification Systems
in Psychiatry: Diagnosis and Global Mental Health in the Era of DSM-5 and
ICD-11.” Current Opinion in Psychiatry 26, no. 5 (2013): 493–497.

Stoller, Robert J., Judd Marmor, Irving Bieber, et al. “A Symposium:

Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature?” American
Journal of Psychiatry 130, no. 11 (1973): 1207–1216.
Stonewall UK. “Glossary of Terms.” Accessed 22 June 2018.
https://www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/glossary-terms

Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Wahlert, Lance, and Sabrina Gill. “Pathological, Disabled, Transgender:

The Ethics, History, Laws, and Contradictions in Models That Best Serve
Transgender Rights.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27, no. 2 (2017):
249–266.
Diasporas, Queer
FARHANG ROUHANI
Professor of Geography
University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA

Ways of critically thinking about the queer diaspora and how

it is unique from other types of diasporas.

The term diaspora came into widespread academic use in addressing the
dispersal of populations that reside across multiple state territories but that
continue to maintain a durable set of relationships and a common sense of
home or homeland. Some of the earliest examples refer to the Jewish,
Greek, African, Palestinian, and Armenian diasporas and to the
relationships of trauma, suffering, and loss associated with population
diffusion. Over time, scholars have expanded what counts as diaspora from
a singular association with victimhood to also include labor, imperial, trade,
and deterritorialized diasporas (Cohen 1997). At the same time, the term
has entered widespread popular usage, as Mournalists and others use it
synonymously with the notion of an immigrant group, either in one country
or multiple countries, as well as to the identities, living spaces, and forms of
belonging of such immigrant communities and to ways of thinking about
them. In the introduction to their pioneering edited volume Queer
Diasporas (2000), Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton argue that the
study of queer diasporas is vital in how it brings together the insights on
sexual otherness gained through LGBTQ studies and on ethnic and racial
otherness brought forth in immigration studies. “Attending to the mobility
of sexuality across the globe and body, as a materiality and a discourse …
brings new insights into the individual and collective paths of queer escape
and reconstitution” (3). This is the promising terrain that queer diasporic
studies occupy.

While the term diaspora has come more and more into popular and
academic usage, Sima Shakhsari warns against the “chic of diaspora”
(2012, 25), the extent to which diaspora has been a trendy academic
buzzword. The problem with this is that such a superficial application of the
term assumes ease of movement and oversimplifies the processes of hybrid
identity formation for transnational, cosmopolitan subMects. In Shakhsari's
analysis of the ways in which Iranian queers are represented in cyberspace,
she concludes that while often differentiated, diaspora acts not all that
differently from exile, in that it similarly “conMures up an idealized image of
homeland as fixed and imagines a homogenous heteronormative Iranian
community” (32). Thus, any critical perspective on diaspora, thus, needs to
go beyond equating it with transnationalism or cosmopolitanism and to pay
attention to the fact that diasporas are always complex, conflicted, and
differentiating.

Two more recent dynamic conceptualizations of diaspora studies argue

against obMectifying diaspora as a coherent subMect of study and assert its
critical dynamism. Rogers Brubaker argues that any usage of the concept of
“diaspora” needs to deal with the power relations through which
immigrants construct, adhere to, and challenge community structures in a
contextualized way that does not assume essential cohesion around
immigrant ethnic identity as a category. Instead, “it may be more fruitful,
and certainly more precise, to speak of diasporic stances, proMects, claims,
idioms, practices, and so on,” which creates opportunities for empirically
based understanding (Brubaker 2005, 13). Stéphane Dufoix (2008)
similarly perceives diasporas as idioms, stances, practices, and arguments
rather than a congealed identity. In his categorization of diasporic
experiences, Dufoix identifies multiple modes through which diasporas are
constructed in relationship with the regime/country of existence, a referent-
origin community, and the spatial relationships between individuals, groups,
and communities, including but not limited to national state identities and
communities.

These arguments have laid the groundwork for conceptualizations of queer

diasporas by revealing diasporas to be contingent, contextual, multiple,
overlapping, and conflicting in different ways, while also serving to urge
scholars to approach them critically, rather than through obMectified, neutral
categories such as nation, community, and family. For queer Muslim
migrants in North America, for example, the spaces that they occupy by
way of their sexual, religious, and ethnic/racial identities means belonging
to communities that are often in opposition to one another and leads to the
need to create new identities and communities that transcend the limitations
of the existing ones (Rouhani2007). In examining queer diasporic contexts,
one must always question the categories one holds as obMective and neutral.

Queer Diaspora Studies: Ideas and Practices

Queer diasporic studies bring together the new insights into diaspora studies
with queer theory. Queer theory has brought together an extensive critique
of the normativities of life and subMect formation, an emphasis on the social
and political significance of transgression and liberation, and a refusal to
give definitions, allowing queer theory to continually refresh and, in a way,
continually queer itself. The development of queer diaspora studies since
the late 1990s has helped bring new dynamism to both queer theory and
diaspora studies. As Gayatri Gopinath argues, “The concept of a queer
diaspora enables a simultaneous critique of heterosexuality and the nation
form while exploding the binary oppositions between nation and diaspora,
heterosexuality and homosexuality, original and copy” (2005, 11). Just as
the queer is positioned as an imitation of the heterosexual, diaspora is seen
as inferior to the nation, and bringing the two together unsettles and
dislocates assumptions about both.
While centering diaspora studies on queerness helps to complicate
understandings of kinship, nation, and nostalgia, a focus on diaspora helps
to bring forth much-needed questions of race, colonization, and
globalization to the center of queer studies. This combined perspective thus
productively serves as an interpretive framework to trouble assumptions
and to make connections. These ideas are effectively brought forth in
ethnographic studies of queer diasporas. Examining the ritual Catholic
religious space of performance by Filipino gay men in New York, for
example, Martin F. Manalansan IV (2000) shows how they occupy a
syncretic space that is neither here nor there, local and global and
transmigratory in scope, with reflections on mainstream US urban gay
culture, Filipino Catholic culture, and Spanish colonialism. While fraught
with challenges and complications, their cross-dressing ritual performances
also allow them to creatively write their own lives and worlds.

This framing makes it essential to understand and critically interpret the

complexities of the relationships between queer diasporic subMects and the
mainstream queer host societies in which they live, in relational racial and
political terms. As such, queer diasporic studies pay attention to how queer
diasporic communities are constructed in relation to mainstream queer
communities, most powerfully developed in Jasbir K. Puar's 2007 work on
homonationalism. Puar argues that in the European and North American
contexts, homonationalism represents a national, patriotic, mostly white
version of homosexuality that asserts its moral superiority by differentiating
itself, particularly from Muslim racial and sexual others. As such, queer
diasporic identities and communities are constructed in relation and
opposition to the existence of such a powerful imposing queer political
force.

The significance of this idea of homonationalism for queer migration

studies is particularly evident in the experiences of LGBTQ asylum seekers
and refugees in Europe and North America. In his analysis of the
experiences of sexual orientation and gender identity refugee asylum
seekers, volunteers, and lawyers, David A. B. Murray (2016) shows how
homonationalism matters in the lives of queer refugees by legally regulating
“authentic” and “inauthentic” LGBTQ refugees, based on dominant notions
of queer “refugeeness.” While the incorporation of sexuality and gender has
disrupted state-sanctioned ideas about who counts as a refugee, it has also
been folded into the nation-state's modes of gatekeeping and identity
keeping, with far-reaching consequences on the lives of queer transnational
migrants.

David L. Eng constructively argues for the potential in beginning from a

queer diasporic approach that “emerges as a concept providing new
methods of contesting traditional family and kinship structures—of
reorganizing national and transnational communities based not on origin,
filiation, and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a
common set of social practices or political commitments” (2003, 4). In this
sense, a queer diasporic approach can simultaneously challenge the
normative, assumed kin and ethnic relations of community and provide the
source and inspiration from which to create new senses of affiliation,
kinship, and community based on a meaningful, understood, and agreed-on
set of commonalities. Expanding on these ideas in his 2010 book The
Feeling of Kinship, Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by
Asian and Asian American artists in order to reveal how such things as
queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the
legacies of Japanese internment form the base of narratives of racial
forgetting and queer freedom in the present.

Queer diaspora scholars emphasize the importance of developing a

methodology that consists of critical reading and interpretation practices. A
queer perspective works “as a methodology, an oppositional mode of
reading, interpretive strategy, or critical lens through which to question
dominant ideologies of gender, sex, and nation” (Parker 2011, 640). Such a
methodology works to read and expose taken-for-granted assumptions and
normativities wherever they appear, even if they arise from what appears to
be a queer source in the first place. For queer migrants, such reading
practices are necessary simultaneously in relation to the dominant voices in
the host country, the leadership of the immigrant community, and the
mainstream gay/queer culture.

While most of the queer diaspora literature concerns queer subMects, a queer
methodology can be applied to destabilize other practices of normativity
(Wesling 2011; Mack 2017). Mehammed Amadeus Mack (2017), for
example, shows how French Arabs and Muslims are queered as inferior,
abnormal, and dangerous sexualized subMects within the dominant culture of
French whiteness. At the same time they present new and dynamic
possibilities for what French culture can be, by creating new opportunities
for queer youth and adult masculinities and community as different from
mainstream French queerness. As such, they are both queered as deviant
from above and are creatively queering Frenchness from below. Being
queered and doing the work of queering, in essence, are not the exclusive
domain of queer-identified subMects, and a queer diasporic interpretative
framework helps to simultaneously reveal the spaces of domination and the
opportunities for transgression, liberation, and creativity from below.

The Geographies of the Queer Diaspora:

Home, Desire, Belonging and Unbelonging
Of particular concern to many queer diaspora scholars is the experience of
home and its related associations with homeland, community, nostalgia,
family, community, and belonging. While mainstream diasporic conceptions
of home and homecoming often present a linear though complex narrative,
from the loss of home, through exile, to the recapture of home in the
migrant community, queer diaspora scholars approach the home through a
perspective that engages with the multiple negotiations with the past,
present, and future that queer migrants face (Fortier 2001; Mai and King
2009). From a queer perspective, the home becomes more visible as an
unsettled, sometimes violent site beyond the assumptions of cohesion in
ethnic-immigrant communities (Wesling 2011). Unlike the progress
narrative of mainstream diasporic narratives, the home is neither a
resolution nor a refuge from dominant society but a space that is itself
fraught with tension and complexity.

Queer diasporic approaches complicate the idea of a sense of home in a way

that shows how it is simultaneously desirable and undesirable, possible and
impossible. As Dina S. Georgis compellingly argues, diaspora is less about
the space of the home and more about the space of the loss of home. “When
repudiated desire, which is to say queer affect, enters the space of the
nation, we return to the space of diaspora: to our ambivalence, to our
fraught longing, to our aggression and negation of home, and to the Door of
No Return” (2006, 13). This complex relationship between diasporic desire
and the tensions around longing significantly complicates the notion of
diasporic home as any kind of refuge within a larger society. It also points
to the complex ways in which desire, yearning, and, in general, affect figure
into diasporic experiences in a way that is often otherwise underrepresented
in diaspora studies.

While conventional diasporic studies pay much attention to the “homing”

instincts and desires through which people construct new, durable
communities, queer diasporic scholars unsettle and disturb the often taken-
for-granted ideas of attachment as given, inevitable, or desirable. Johanna
X. K. Garvey uses the concept of “queer (un)belonging” to identify
habitable spaces that “undo belonging while not leading to the destructive
behavior of not-belonging” (2011, 757). This notion of queer unbelonging
starts with the premise that there is no such thing as a “queer homeland.”
While any sense of a diasporic homeland is imbued with mythic, nostalgic
attributes, in the context of the formation of a queer diaspora such a point of
origin is simply impossible. While a queer diasporic stance disavows
belonging in a stable, settled sense, it is impossible also to live in a
permanent state of not-belonging. “Queer unbelonging” represents a space
that seems impossible but can be made habitable and real. In her analysis,
Garvey identifies some of the maMor elements of queer unbelonging as an
embrace of the reality of daily migrant life that does not conform to
diasporic nostalgia, the shaping of a different relationship to time and space
that does not conform to a linear narrative, and new methods of reading and
identifying people that incorporate difference into community in a way that
introduces instability, uncertainty, and dynamism into a previously static
conception.

What a queer diaspora approach does above all else is to show the
constructive potential of residing within the uncomfortable spaces that
disorient normative domestic arrangements. This uncomfortable though
essential and life-giving relationship with belonging is something that queer
diasporic scholars examine particularly in the lives of queer-identified
migrants, who have an unsettled relationship with both their immigrant and
mainstream gay host communities but also with diasporic subMects who are
not sexual or gender minorities. The strength of this framework lies in its
simultaneous emphasis on how diasporas are subMugated and how they
creatively carve out spaces of liberation. Mack (2017) provides a
compelling account of such a form of queer unbelonging through his
discussion of Arab and Muslim ethnic virility cultures in France.

In his 2015 analysis of US Iranian women's memoirs, Farhang Rouhani

examines how a queer diaspora lens supports a vital set of reading practices
to counter the conventional Orientalism through which people read into
experiences of home, family, gender, and nation. This approach calls into
question the normative, linear progress narratives through which people
interpret these memoirs, seeks to move beyond debates over what counts as
“authentic” in the Iranian diasporic experience, and challenges how ideas of
Iranianness and Iranian Americanness are assumed to be coherent, stable,
and essential categories. At the same time, Rouhani argues that these
memoirs can be queerly read for ways of relating and living differently,
constructing an unstable sense of home that lives critically with the past,
present, and future in a reimagined, liberatory way. As Gopinath argues,
such an approach allows research to critically interpret but also support “the
ways in which those who occupy impossible spaces transform them into
vibrant, livable spaces of possibility” (2005, 194).

SEE ALSO Homonationalism in Africa; Human Rights; Human Rights and

Queer Arab Refugees; Marriage Migration in Asia; Migrant Queer
Communities, US; Migration to Europe; Pacific Island and Pacific Island
Diaspora Identities; Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora; Refugees and Asylum
in Africa

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartram, David, Maritsa V. Poros, and Pierre Monforte. Key Concepts in
Migration. Los Angeles: Sage, 2014.

Brubaker, Rogers. “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” Ethnic and Racial Studies

28, no. 1 (2005): 1–19.

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press,

1997.

Dufoix, Stéphane. Diasporas. Translated by William Rodarmor. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2008.

Eng, David L. “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas.” Social Text

21, no. 3 (2003): 1–37.

Eng, David L. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the

Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Fortier, Anne-Marie. “‘Coming Home’: Queer Migrations and Multiple

Evocations of Home.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4
(2001): 405–424.
Garvey, Johanna X. K. “Spaces of Violence, Desire, and Queer
(Un)belonging: Dionne Brand's Urban Diasporas.” In “Contemporary
Women's Writing and Queer Diasporas,” edited by Emma Parker. Special
issue, Textual Practice 25, no. 4 (2011): 757–777.

Georgis, Dina S. “Cultures of Expulsion: Memory, Longing, and the Queer

Space of Diaspora.” Journal of Black Canadian Studies 1, no. 1 (2006): 4–
27.

Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian

Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University, 2005.

Gopinath, Gayatri. “Foreword: Queer Diasporic Interventions.” In

“Contemporary Women's Writing and Queer Diasporas,” edited by Emma
Parker. Special issue, Textual Practice 25, no. 4 (2011): 635–638.

Mack, Mehammed Amadeus. Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the

Sexualization of National Culture. New York: Fordham University Press,
2017.

Mai, Nicola, and Russell King. “Love, Sexuality, and Migration: Mapping
the Issue(s).” Mobilities 4, no. 3 (2009): 295–307.

Manalansan, Martin F., IV. “Diasporic Deviants/Divas: How Filipino Gay

Transmigrants ‘Play with the World.’” In Queer Diasporas, edited by Cindy
Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler, 183–203. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000.

Murray, David A. B. Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus. London: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2016.

Parker, Emma. “Introduction: Queer, There and Everywhere.” In

“Contemporary Women's Writing and Queer Diasporas,” edited by Emma
Parker. Special issue, Textual Practice 25, no. 4 (2011): 639–647.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer
Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Rouhani, Farhang. “Religion, Identity, and Activism: Queer Muslim

Diasporic Identities.” In Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices, and
Politics, edited by Kath Browne, Jason Lim, and Gavin Brown, 169–180.
Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.

Rouhani, Farhang. “Queering the ‘Iranian’ and the ‘Diaspora’ of the Iranian
Diaspora.” In Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures, edited by Gul
Ozyegin, 355–370. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015.

Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno, and Cindy Patton. Introduction to Queer

Diasporas, edited by Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler, 1–14.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Shakhsari, Sima. “From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora:

Cyberspace, the War on Terror, and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer.”
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 8, no. 3 (2012): 14–40.

Wesling, Meg. “Neocolonialism, Queer Kinship, and Diaspora: Contesting

the Romance of the Family in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night and
Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory.” In “Contemporary Women's
Writing and Queer Diasporas,” edited by Emma Parker. Special issue,
Textual Practice 25, no. 4 (2011): 649–670.
Digital Cultures in Latin America
ELISABETH JAY FRIEDMAN
Chair and Professor, Politics Department
University of San Francisco, CA

The Latin American LGBTQ community's use of the internet

and digital tools to create community, promote dialogue,
and advocate for LGBTQ rights.

LGBTQ activists in Latin America organized before the advent of the

internet, but the internet and social media in particular have expanded
opportunities and brought new complexities to their work for recognition
and rights. This entry offers a consideration of the role of online media in
such activism through two lenses. The first is a focus on LGBTQ
“counterpublics,” or “the places, spaces, or means through which those
pushed to societies' margins develop their identities, construct communities,
and formulate strategies for transforming wider publics” (Friedman 2017,
3). This concept is frequently used to understand how internet-based media
provides a place for both personal expression and public citizenship in ways
that enable resistance to the hetero- and cisnormativity enacted through
mainstream media and society (Ciszek 2017; Harp, Bachmann, and Guo
2012; Pullen 2010; Soriano 2014; Warner 2002). In counterpublics,
individuals and communities can engage with “public issues that are barred,
tabooed, restricted, or subMect to regulation offline” (Corrêa et al. 2011, 23)
as they seek to develop their own identities and transform society. Given
their history of marginalization, such counterpublics have long developed
within an alternative media field.
The other lens is one that assumes the entwined nature of social
mobilization and media technology, rather than seeing them as static,
separable entities. Although the internet is popularly understood as a tool or
resource for those seeking social change, both its development and
deployment demonstrate a sociomaterial reality. The internet, like all
technology, is both “socially constituted and constituting” (Dahlberg 2004),
reflecting and refracting social relations of power, values, and the lived
experiences of material reality. LGBTQ counterpublics incorporate internet
applications in ways that are informed by specific histories and present-day
contexts of access and activism.

Role of Online Media in LGBTQ

Counterpublics
LGBTQ counterpublics in Latin America were well positioned to take
advantage of the early internet. In the decades before the 1990s, they took
part in regional resistance to authoritarian repression and, later, attempts to
expand democratic openings to include a wide range of rights. Even as
right-wing regimes targeted them, many Left parties and movements, as
well as the revolutionary states of Cuba (1959–) and Nicaragua (1979–
1990), reMected, if not repressed, gays and lesbians in their promotion of
heteronormative social ideals. The advent of democracy brought more
political space for civic organizing but no guarantee of acceptance; police
and social violence were endemic, especially against those who
transgressed gender norms in their self-presentation and actions. However,
the HIV/AIDS crisis beginning in the 1980s led to more attention—and
resources—for LGBTQ communities, as they strengthened internally and
networked across national and international borders. Reacting to being
sidelined in gay rights groups and straightdominated feminist organizations,
lesbian feminists founded autonomous groups such as Centro de
Investigación y Capacitación de la MuMer (Center for Research and Training
for Women) in Mexico and MuMeres Creando (Women Creating) in Bolivia,
while also connecting transnationally at the Encuentros Feministas
Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (Latin American and Caribbean Feminist
Encounters). Trans activism through organizations such as the Asociación
de Travestis, Transexuales y Transgéneros de Argentina (Association of
Travestis [biological men who assume a feminine gender expression],
Transsexuals, and Transgenders of Argentina) also grew in strength and
numbers to draw attention to the specific problems trans people faced in
social, medical, and legal arenas. LGBTQ groups built coalitions with
feminist movements in promoting “sexual citizenship” and made common
cause with other counterpublics in an attempt to influence political
representatives and policy makers. Thus, in response to dismissal and worse
in wider publics, activists built their own organizations, developed
alliances, and extended networks across national and regional borders.

WALTER MERCADO: QUEER DIGITAL ICON

Walter Mercado (1932–), known since 2010 as Shanti Ananda (which

means “peace everlasting” in Sanskrit), is a Puerto Rican astrologer,
media personality, and best-selling author. For over thirty years,
Mercado has hosted radio, television, and internet-based programs that
include horoscopes and astrological predictions that are widely
consumed across the hispanophone world, including in the United
States among Latinx-identified populations (Latinx being a gender-
neutral form of the Spanish Latino/Latina). He is the author of several
books about mysticism and spirituality and has appeared in various
other media, including advertisements for retail brands, Spanish-
language telenovelas, and films aimed at a Latinx audience. His
programming has also spawned a variety of products available for
purchase in stores and online, including prayer beads, candles, and
other spiritual iconography. Broadly speaking, his work promotes the
idea that some gifted people, through intensive study and focus, can
access transcendental Orientalist wisdom and achieve a fuller
understanding of astrological influences on events of both personal and
global significance.
For most of Mercado's career, his programming has been mainly
accessible on television, on radio, or in print. Since the advent of social
media, however, his primary means of connecting with his audience
has been through Twitter (@waltermercadotv) and similar sites. The
digital age has given Mercado the opportunity to expand his audience
and his brand, both intentionally and unintentionally. For example,
while Mercado has not publicly discussed his sexuality, his flamboyant
public persona is widely associated with queerness and a camp
aesthetic. In the internet age, he is known as much for his appearance
and his wardrobe as for his programming, and he has achieved a status
as a queer icon despite his coquettish and evasive responses to
questions about his identity status. In public appearances, Mercado
regularly wears lavish capes and robes, styles his hair in a bright blond
bouffant, appears to have had cosmetic surgery, and wears visible
makeup, all of which has invited much speculation about his sexuality.
However, Mercado has been willfully ambiguous when asked about
this subMect by interviewers. For example, in a 2008 online interview
with the American Spanish-language television network Univision,
Mercado replied to questions about his sexuality by stating that he
practices tantra, continuing: “You unite your masculine and feminine
forces and achieve a cosmic orgasm…. Some Hindu masters didn't
have physical sex, but cosmic sex” (Hedrick 2013; translation by
Austin C. Eklund). References to physical sex that transcends
boundaries of gender and corporeal desire come up regularly in
Mercado's work. Scholars note that, ironically, his ambivalence about
his own sexuality has done some of the cultural work of queering him
as a public figure despite his transparent avoidance of the subMect. For
example, the cultural historian Diana Taylor remarks that

Walter specializes in the art of reversal, exaggeration,

conflation, contradiction, camp, ho cursi, rasquache, and
 relaMo. He endows the drag queen with papal authority….
Instead of acting as the intermediary for God's love, he
offers us his own…. He is a ham, a diva, a comadre, a
connoisseur, a businessman, and an hombre culto.

(2003, 125)

Mercado is by no means the only example of New Age mysticism in

Latin American culture. For example, El Indio Amazónico is another
celebrity Latinx healer and spiritual guide who, in lieu of providing his
“services” through the media, offers in-person diagnosis and treatment
(e.g., palm and tarot card readings) in New York City, Los Angeles,
and his native Colombia. However, Mercado is inarguably the most
prominent representative of Latin American queer mysticism.
Paradoxically, many queer-identified and gender-nonconforming Latin
Americans have struggled to find acceptance in the region, which
remains overwhelmingly Christian. As a result, many queer and
gender-nonconforming Latinx people identify as unaffiliated with
mainstream religious groups, instead preferring to engage with
nondenominational spiritual practices, many of which have Eastern
origins. Many consider Mercado the primary ambassador of Orientalist
mysticism in the Spanish-speaking world, with scholars noting that
such mysticism manages to coexist peacefully even with traditional
Catholicism.

Scholars also suggest that Mercado's access to spiritual capital permits

him to hide his queerness in plain sight, as he regularly indicates that
his ambiguous sexual and gender presentation is attributable to the
form of mysticism he practices and promotes. To some, Mercado's
queer and camp aesthetic is consistent with notions of a Latinx
identity, which has historically been characterized by “excessive affect
and self-display” and other strategies of “self-fashioning,” including
taste, music, food, and other cultural markers. This presentation, a
form of queer-specific camp, has kept generations of audiences loyal
to Mercado and to the particular Mercado brand of strange,
contradictory, and wildly compelling televised spirituality for which he
is responsible.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hedrick, Tace. “Neoliberalism and Orientalism in Puerto Rico: Walter

Mercado's Queer Spiritual Capital.” Centro Journal 25, no. 1 (2013):
180–209.

La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. “Gay Shame, Latina and Latino-Style:

A Critique of White Queer Performativity.” In Gay Latino Studies: A
Critical Reader, edited by Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier
Martínez, 55–80. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Mercado, Walter. Beyond the Horizon: Visions of the New

Millennium. New York: Warner Books, 1997.

Pew Research Center. “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change

in a Historically Catholic Region.” 13 November 2014.
http://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/

Romberg, Raquel. Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the

Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2003.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural

Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Austin C. Eklund
PhD candidate
University at Albany, State University of New York
Extensive networking across the region made these counterpublics ideal
spaces for the diffusion of networked technology. Prior to the massification
of commercialized access in the early twenty-first century, they benefited
from a deliberate expansion of the earliest networks of networked
computers outside of the market- and state-based priorities of commercial
and governmental providers. The Association for Progressive
Communications (APC) connected civically minded internet service
providers into a global network through which activists and advocates could
communicate nationally and globally (Willetts 2011). Those based in Latin
America and Africa understood both the potential and the great need for
alternative networks of information and communications, and they lobbied
contacts in the Global North to ensure access to the necessary hardware and
software. Thus, as they emerged from the authoritarian period of the 1980s,
many in Latin America became “early adopters” of the internet through
APC members (and some founders) across the region: Alternex in Brazil,
Chasque in Uruguay, Nicarao in Nicaragua, Ecuanex in Ecuador, La Neta in
Mexico, and Wamani in Argentina. APC helped Latin American activists
participate in national and global counterpublics a decade before
commercial internet spread across the region.

The commercialization of internet access and the rise of social media have
transformed connectivity and modalities, and progressive counterpublics
have taken advantage of them. In Latin America, activism is now as highly
correlated with social media use as it is with political ideology and
participation in face-to-face community organizations (Valenzuela,
Arriagada, and Scherman 2012; Valenzuela et al. 2016); a reported 65
percent of activists use social media to engage with one another and build
networks through profile creation and contacts (Harp, Bachmann, and Guo
2012). A younger generation of activists relies on self-curated information
on their Facebook feeds rather than mainstream media (Scherman,
Arriagada, and Valenzuela 2015). For them, there is no bright-line
distinction between online and offline arenas; instead, physical mobilization
is enhanced by online participation. As information circulates across
networks, it not only helps to shape protest narratives but also encourages
turnout as contacts repost, “like,” comment, and promise to attend meetings
and rallies (Salzman 2016). However, traditional sources of inequality, such
as class, rurality, race, and gender, continue to affect access (Scherman,
Arriagada, and Valenzuela 2015; Valenzuela et al. 2016; Friedman 2017).
To take the reality of the region into account, counterpublic communities
often deploy “chains of access” strategies, using a combination of online
and offline media to connect those with and without easy access (Friedman
2017).

Private Space, Public Platform

LGBTQ counterpublic internet practices reflect the larger politics of
sexuality and gender in the region: a blurring and reconfiguration of what is
considered appropriate for private and public life. Such an approach is
prompted by their sociopolitical context. There has been notable progress:
the maMority of countries have outlawed discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation and increasingly gender expression or identity; openly
LGBTQ people serve in public office; and LGBTQ life has become visible
at enormous pride parades, in lively gay neighborhoods, and on the ever-
popular telenovelas (soap operas). But many obstacles remain, from
constitutional prohibitions on samesex marriage to frequent violence
against transgender people to the ways in which poverty and racial
discrimination interact to restrict access to rights protections. Because the
region is characterized by hetero- and cisnormative institutions, asserting a
nonnormative sexual or gender identity implicitly (if not explicitly)
politicizes the putatively private issues of self-definition, love, relationship,
family, and the like. LGBTQ individuals and communities continue to
experience reMection and, too often, harm, for their challenge to social
norms. But as with others who experience social opprobrium, “in the case
of developing countries and other semi-authoritarian national contexts …
online networks, however constrained by problems of access, can in fact
offer real spaces and possibilities for oppressed groups to build new
democratic narratives” (Matos 2017, 420). Thus, LGBTQ people have
incorporated the internet for the twinned counterpublic goals of finding
safe, private spaces for developing identity and finding community and of
occupying a public platform from which to challenge marginalization and
exclusion. And here they have found a synchronicity of internet affordance
(its “inherent” properties) and community norms and needs for networking
and even survival.

For those beginning to explore their sexual and gender identities,

particularly in contexts where such exploration is difficult or dangerous, the
internet can provide a “virtual lifeline” (Stein 2003, 182) of information and
interaction instead of isolation. Those who can access it—increasingly
through mobile devices but also on home, workplace, and school computers
as well as in cybercafés and community centers—can assume their identity
before coming out in “real time.” Information on and discussion about
identity, as well as rights, health, intimate relationships, sexual pleasure,
and more, can be accessed through text (and texts), photos, and videos. The
opportunity to engage in self-representation, especially through social
media, has both individual benefits and can show others that they are not
alone. Although the deeply embedded inequalities of Latin American
societies—such as class, race/ethnicity, and geographical location—have
mediated LGBTQ access to digital modalities from the beginning, the
networked existence of LGBTQ communities has also helped spread digital
connections. Before the widespread use of cell phones, for example,
organizations dedicated to LGBTQ empowerment and rights often included
computer/internet access as part of their services.

Even before the advent of social media, email and websites enabled
LGBTQ individuals to discern their identities in relatively safe spaces. The
founders of the lesbian magazine LeSVOZ in Mexico City and the regional
lesbian discussion list Safo Piensa reported how often women would reach
out to them to ask for resources or express gratitude for the information and
connections they provided. Personal contacts were some of the most
popular areas of early websites, and a crucial element of community
building, giving readers a sense that others like them existed. Discussion
lists and other applications directed at and heavily used for exchange, such
as the Yahoo groups run by the decades-old Brazilian organization Grupo
Gay da Bahia (Gay Group of Bahia), prefigured the social media explosion.
Concerns for privacy and safety meant that founders often sought digital
protection for the online community building they were undertaking. But
these were not spaces divorced from the reality of dissention and debate;
difficult topics, such as whether only women-born women could form part
of lesbian feminist organizations and communities, were aired, and the
resulting discussions could be explosive (Friedman 2017).

SOURCE: HTTPS://ORGULLOLGBTCOLOMBIA.BLOGSPOT.COM/
Screen Grab of the Colombian Blog OrgulloLGBT (LGBTPride). Latin American
LGBT internet sites such as OrgulloLGBT provide a range of resources to their users,
from international news, to entertainment and leisure, to psychological consultations,
chat rooms, and personals.

Virtual Networks for Activism

Virtual networks enabled LGBTQ people to “transgress the frontier of
intimacy,” exchanging information about issues that the wider society
would prefer remain hidden in private, thus helping to break with the
culture of silence (Hooker Solano 2017, 127; translation by author). As
social media advanced across the region, it became an instant arena for
LGBTQ “transgressions”; for example, the Orkut social networking
platform, which was highly popular in Brazil from its advent in 2004 until
overtaken by the Facebook phenomenon, provided space for “dissident
sexual selves” (Corrêa et al. 2011, 63). Such transgressions could also lead
to an assertion of identity in public, often translated into a demand for
visibility: for example, in Latin America visibilidad lésbica, or lesbian
visibility, is a frequently heard demand for the recognition of lesbian
existence. While resource restrictions make offline space for lesbian, trans,
and queer women difficult to maintain, digitally enhanced counterpublics
enable activism and other forms of community expression (Friedman 2017;
Ciszek 2017).

Although hardly unique to this community, the process of “sharing …

common experience serves as an affirmation of belonging” and helps
promote mobilization despite physical separation; online exchange “works
as the foundation for a social movement among members ‘disembedded’
physically, but ‘embedded’ socially and politically” (Soriano 2014, 33).
While many movements may benefit from such action at a distance, it takes
on particular relevance for those who cannot easily access local sources of
support and solidarity, such as children alienated from their families
because of their sexual or gender identities. Nevertheless, digital
community is no panacea for real-world reMection. It can result in a kind of
segregation, enabling users to rely more on virtual support than seek to
build it face-to-face in local communities. As inspirational as border-
crossing ideas and an imagined international community may be, lack of
attention to the specific contexts and lived experiences of local actors can
be detrimental to local and national solidarities and activities. Moreover,
online means and spaces are hardly free from the dangers and
discrimination of offline life. As LGBTQ individuals raise their profiles and
offer their views online, aggressive commenters or hackers often pursue
them there (Soriano 2014; Friedman 2017).

Despite such challenges, a wide range of organizations have brought

activist proMects online, seeking to nurture and inform local, national, and
regional audiences. In doing so, they not only focus on policy change and
other political demands, as do other counterpublics; they also continue to
address a wide range of topics in LGBTQ culture that, like their struggles
for recognition and Mustice, are often sidelined in society and go unreported
in mass media. Portals such as Um Outro Olhar (An Other Look) from
Brazil, Rompiendo el Silencio (Breaking the Silence) from Chile, and
SentidoG (Gay Sense) from Argentina, along with the OrgulloLGBT
(LGBTPride) blog from Colombia, have provided a range of resources,
from international news, to entertainment and leisure, to psychological
consultations, chat rooms, and personals. Illustrating the continuing
importance of transnational support, the Colombian American Andrés
Duque, a prolific blogger and activist, has reached out through Twitter
(@noticiasLGBT) to offer updates on Latin American and international
LGBT news, sending out well over 100,000 tweets to more than 50,000
followers since 2009.

While some efforts have wholeheartedly embraced the “pink dollar”

commercial opportunities for selling lifestyle, merchandise, and tourism,
others focus more on individual growth, community development, and
activist campaigns. More targeted efforts, such as the now-defunct
electronic Mournal La Revista Labia (The Labia Magazine) and the database
of scholarly articles of the Peruvian organization Grupo de Activistas
Lesbianas Feministas (Lesbian Feminist Activists Group), or the Mexican
lesbian feminist magazine and website LeSVOZ, bring their dedication to
specific communities online. Resources continue to be a problem, however,
with the frequent disappearance of web-based proMects showing that the
challenges of sustainability go beyond internet access. LeSVOZ, for its part,
adapted to changes in the internet by relying on a cadre of volunteers but
found it time-consuming to keep up with the dynamic mediascape. Online,
it migrated from a basic website to blog and Facebook, defying the
censorship, ignorance, and high cost of mass media outlets by circulating
information, connection, and analysis online. But it also kept a print
magazine in circulation, enabling readers for whom a cybercafé is too
public a venue for personal perusal to read the latest at a time and place of
their choosing (Friedman 2017).

One notable example of the public-facing organizing enhanced by internet

incorporation are the campaigns for LGBTQ recognition from Argentina.
The successful campaigns for same-sex marriage (2010) and genderidentity
recognition (2012) benefited from the efficacious deployment of online
resources. Esteban Paulón, a prominent leader and prodigious tweeter,
explained in a 2012 interview that activists took advantage of the more
static and social media of the time—web portals, Facebook, and blogs—and
thus “won the technology battle” with the conservative opposition (Paulón
2012). Inspired by the example of the Spanish same-sex marriage law
passed in 2005, a younger generation of activists eagerly contributed their
skill sets. The graphic designer and Mournalist Martin Peretti Scioli, based in
Rosario, Argentina, set up an information portal known as Actitud Gay
(Gay attitude). He and collaborators not only carefully followed
developments in Argentina but brought together research about LGBTQ
issues across Latin America and other world regions for encouragement and
perspective. It became a resource for the region, with traffic from
throughout Latin America, as well as Spain. During the heat of the
legislative debate, as the portal streamed live congressional debate, it
received thousands of views a day.

Mixed Media
Online efforts have gone forward in combination with other media. This is a
hallmark of internet incorporation in Latin American counterpublics, given
the reality of the many inequalities that transect these diverse communities.
Even as the reach of the internet expanded through the second decade of the
twenty-first century, Vox (Voice), an LGBTQ organization based in
Rosario, Argentina, sponsored a radio broadcast over the national public
network called Pasa en las meMores familias (It happens in the best families)
focusing on a wide range of issues and providing a space for both
discussion and denunciation of discrimination and violence. The show
producers and hosts were aware that in order to reach older adults, or those
in marginal neighborhoods or in more remote or rural areas, they needed to
share the information they got from the internet in a more accessible format.
The radio show could be a safe space for engaging with LGBTQ issues
where the listeners could remain entirely anonymous—and where young
people and their parents could learn together. To represent the show's wide
audience, its producers broadcast questions and comments that came to
them from their telephone answering machine and through Facebook and
by text message.

Vox is not the only organization that uses a combination of newer and older
media to reach its community. The Nicaraguan radio show Sin máscaras
(Without masks) also rebroadcast news from the internet and provided a
forum in which people could ask questions anonymously. In this way the
show was also able to reach those living in remote areas where radio is the
only accessible media, to seek the information they wanted (Howe 2013).
This kind of “dialogic” media-based activism formed a basis for later social
media use (Howe 2013). Local activists were well placed to become
mediators of information circulating globally ever faster and through ever
more applications.

Blogging for Self- and Social Recognition

In Latin America, according to Carolina Matos, “blogs have particularly
emerged as networks for debate and dialogue, alternative information,
democratic self-expression and political criticism” (2017, 420). They are of
considerable importance in countries such as Nicaragua, where conservative
values and everyday violence can make LGBTQ life difficult. Nicaraguan
gay and lesbian bloggers in their twenties have transformed this application
to suit their counterpublic needs for “escapes, resistances, and
transgressions” (Hooker Solano 2017). Some deploy anonymity or fictitious
personas as a form of catharsis when coming out is not an option in “real
time.” For the activist Franklin Leonel Hooker Solano, blogging has been a
felicitous “escape from offline reality,” enabling empowerment: it “has been
my biggest act of autonomy, has strengthened my capacity of agency, my
right to be however makes me most happy, my capacity to decide when to
write, about which issues, in which formats and how long” (2017, 113;
translation by author). Together, blog writers and readers can experience
companionship and build community based on shared experiences (Hooker
Solano 2017). Lesbian and gay bloggers have also intervened in broader
society by making public that which is rendered private, insisting that
“there are infinite ways of being-inhabiting our own bodies” (Hooker
Solano 2017, 17; translation by author). In doing so they break with
dominant narratives, making visible what gay men and lesbians have
brought to politics, society, culture, and history.

In Argentina, a similar goal has been the driving force behind the lesbian
feminist blog Potencia Tortillera (Dyke Power): to insist on making visible
both contemporary activism and lesbians' own history, too often passed over
in other venues and unknown to broader publics. The founders reimagined
the blog format as a digital archive, including print, photography, video, and
audio clips. Its primary intended audience is national, to show the lesbian
counterpublics of Argentina a past they can learn from and build on. The
digital archive includes a wide range of generational and political positions
and captures the stories of those organizing both inside and outside the
powerful capital city of Buenos Aires. As so often happens with such
proMects, it has been based on volunteer labor, in this case so that there
would be no external pressures for a particular politics.
Blogs have also been the application of choice for trans activists in Brazil
seeking to denounce the all-too-frequent violence against their
communities, including the terrible occurrences of transfeminicide. As with
the Nicaraguan bloggers, these bloggers comprise a new generation that
engages in both “self-recognition and the struggle for social recognition”
through a new form of “political praxis” (de Lima Carvalho and Carrara
2015, 394; translation by author). The ability to post, repost, comment, and
recirculate through other media both enables public deliberation and
stimulates mobilization. As in Nicaragua, the focus on internet-enabled,
particularly blog-focused activism, demonstrates a generational divide in
activist approach. In the Brazilian trans community, this divide maps over a
larger debate over the linked strategies and goals of activism. On one side,
the older generation is concerned that the internet has been “overvalued …
as a space for activism” and argue that offline action is more effective (de
Lima Carvalho and Carrara 2015, 396; translation by author). To them,
effectiveness is measured in terms of legal change. On the other side, the
younger generation insists that online discussions can enable exchange with
other counterpublic communities and wider publics. These exchanges,
focused on shifting the way people think, are this generation's central
concern.

LGBTQ Latin Americans have integrated the internet into their

counterpublics to enhance both their private and public lives, while insisting
on defining the borders between them in ways that benefit their community
instead of conforming to what wider publics expect or approve. Those who
have experienced isolation because of their sexual or gender identity can
learn more about themselves and build community. Through a combination
of old and new media, activist resources and alternative information are
circulated and recirculated in ways that are critical for those sidelined or
stereotyped by mass media. Ever eager to communicate their own reality,
LGBTQ individuals and activists alike have embraced the shifting
landscape of modalities, from mail, websites, and early social networking
sites such as Orkut, to later ones including Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, to
present their perspectives to each other and the public, as they seek to shift
the terms of the debate over the politics and policies of sexualities and
genders. As the Argentine lesbian feminist activist and Potencia Tortillera
cofounder Fabiana Tron writes of the space of the internet, “The idea is to
try to construct another imaginary, in which gay, lesbian, travesti people
would not be seen as monsters, but more as other ways of being people”
(quoted in Friedman 2017, 182).

SEE ALSO Archives in Latin America; Human Rights and Activism in

Latin America; Lesbian Feminist Encuentros of Latin America and the
Caribbean; Travesti and Trans Activism in Latin America and the
Caribbean

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ciszek, Erica L. “Todo MeMora en el Ambiente: An Analysis of Digital
LGBT Activism in Mexico.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 41, no. 4
(2017): 313–330.

Corrêa, Sonia, Marina Maria, Jandira Queiroz, et al. “Internet Regulation

and Sexual Politics in Brazil.” In ://EROTICS: Sex, Rights, and the Internet,
edited by Jac sm Kee, 19–65. Melville, South Africa: Association for
Progressive Communications, 2011.
https://www.genderit.org/sites/default/upload/erotics_finalresearch_apcwns
p.pdf

Dahlberg, Lincoln. “Internet Research Tracings: Towards Non-reductionist

Methodology.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9, no. 3
(2004). doi:10.1111/M.1083-6101.2004.tb00289.x

de Lima Carvalho, Mario Felipe, and Sérgio Carrara. “Ciberativismo trans:

Consideracões sobre uma nova geraçāo militante” [Trans cyberactivism:
Observations on a new generation of activists]. Contemporânea: Revista de
comunicação e cultura 13, no. 2 (2015): 382–400.
Friedman, Elisabeth Jay. Interpreting the Internet: Feminist and Queer
Counterpublics in Latin America. Oakland: University of California Press,
2017.

Harp, Dustin, Ingrid Bachmann, and Lei Guo. “The Whole Online World Is
Watching: Profiling Social Networking Sites and Activists in China, Latin
America, and the United States.” International Journal of Communication 6
(2012): 298–321.

Hooker Solano, Franklin Leonel. “Narrativas subversivas de lesbianas y

homosexuales en el ciberespacio nicaragüense: Fugas, resistancias y
transgresiones” [Subversive narratives of lesbians and homosexuals in
Nicaraguan cyberspace: Escapes, resistances, and transgressions]. MA
thesis, Universidad Centroamericana, Managua, Nicaragua, 2017.

Howe, Cymene. Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in

Postrevolutionary Nicaragua. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Matos, Carolina. “New Brazilian Feminisms and Online Networks:

Cyberfeminism, Protest, and the Female ‘Arab Spring.’” International
Sociology 32, no. 3 (2017): 417–434.

Paulón, Esteban. President, Federación Argentina de Lesbianas, Gays,

Bisexuales y Trans [Argentine Federation of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and
Trans]. Interview with author, 15 June 2012.

Pullen, Christopher. “Introduction.” In LGBT Identity and Online New

Media, edited by Christopher Pullen and Margaret Cooper, 1–13. New
York: Routledge, 2010.

Salzman, Ryan. “Exploring Social Media Use and Protest Participation in

Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Communication Research 5, no.
2 (2016): 72–85.
Scherman, Andrés, Arturo Arriagada, and Sebastián Valenzuela. “Student
and Environmental Protests in Chile: The Role of Social Media.” Politics
35, no. 2 (2015): 151–171.

Soriano, Cheryll Ruth Reyes. “Constructing Collectivity in Diversity:

Online Political Mobilization of a National LGBT Political Party.” Media,
Culture, and Society 36, no. 1 (2014): 20–36.

Stein, Edward. “Queers Anonymous: Lesbians, Gay Men, Free Speech, and
Cyberspace.” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 38, no. 1
(2003): 159–213.

Valenzuela, Sebastián, Arturo Arriagada, and Andrés Scherman. “The

Social Media Basis of Youth Protest Behavior: The Case of Chile.”
Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (2012): 299–314.

Valenzuela, Sebastián, Nicolás M. Somma, Andrés Scherman, and Arturo

Arriagada. “Social Media in Latin America: Deepening or Bridging Gaps in
Protest Participation?” Online Information Review 40, no. 5 (2016): 695–
711.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books,

2002.

Willetts, Peter. “NGOs, Networking, and the Creation of the Internet.” In

Non-governmental Organizations in World Politics: The Construction of
Global Governance, 84–113. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011.
Dissidence in Singapore
J. DANIEL LUTHER
PhD candidate, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
SOAS University of London, United Kingdom

The ways in which queer activists navigate the authoritarian

laws of the city-state of Singapore, particularly through
performance art.

Dissident sexual minorities in Singapore struggle against a unique form of

governmentality that is both authoritarian and paternalistic. Their struggle is
compounded by the small size of the country and the vast reach of state
power, which leaves little recourse to the shelter of anonymity or protest
politics familiar in Western liberal democracies. This entry examines the
unique dissidence mounted by sexual minorities in Singapore and how their
strategies of survival and resistance fill in the nooks and crevices that form
between the omnipotent tentacles of authoritarian state power. Sexual
minorities in Singapore exploit loopholes within the government's own laws
to negotiate the terms of their visibility, expression, and identity. The entry
begins by examining the way in which these loopholes created the
conditions that led to the formation of Singapore's Chinatown as a gay
district. The entry then outlines the theoretical debates around these
loopholes—known in Singapore studies as illiberal pragmatics—and
finally explores the way in which the government's illiberal pragmatism
becomes the foundation for dissident strategies of resistance emerging from
the spatial possibilities of the gay district of Chinatown.

Chinatown: Singapore's Unofficial Gay

District
Located within the heart of Singapore at right angles from the financial
district around the spruced-up Marina Bay is Chinatown, one of three
pockets of state-designated cultural heritage. Originally designed to serve
the practices of ethnic segregation under colonial rule, Chinatown grew
rapidly to house nearly one-third of the colony's municipal population
within its limited expanse of two square kilometers (C. K. K. Tan 2015).
Singapore's strategic location as a colonial port, its rapidly growing
population, and its position as a hub of the sex trade (Warren 2003), among
other factors, affected the character of Chinatown. Anthropologist Chris K.
K. Tan notes that it “offered gaudy temples, brothels, gambling houses, and
opium dens,” leaving it “queered … from the very start” (2015, 2208). This
character persisted well into independent Singapore, until the Urban
Redevelopment Authority embarked on a proMect to transform the district
between the 1970s and the 1990s. It was this transformation that allowed
for the formation of what has unofficially become the gay neighborhood in
the city-state of Singapore. This neighborhood exists in contradiction to the
Victorian laws and morality of the postcolonial city-state, which still
criminalizes homosexuality.

HONG LIM PARK: A CENTER OF LGBT DISSIDENCE

Located in Chinatown, Hong Lim Park is Singapore's first privately

owned public garden, with a long history, encompassing even the
period of Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. Responding to the
need for liberalization, the government designated the park as
Speaker's Corner in 2000, relaxing rules regarding public assembly
and address, thereby creating an official venue for dissent. Yet the park
has had a longer history of dissidence. Hong Lim Park was an
important cruising ground for gay men who did not fit the cultural
demarcations of the Bugis Street and the Orchard Road scenes. The
noted Singapore LGBT activist Roy Tan, in a photo essay
documenting Singapore's gay past, says that Hong Lim Park was a
cruising ground during “the night-time for more than half a century”
(2012, 120). Elderly Chineseeducated gay men and married men were
its most frequent users until the 1990s, when the park was gentrified.

Extending its role as a site of LGBT dissent, Singapore's annual Pink

Dot event has been held in Hong Lim Park since 2009. Pink Dot was
born from the earlier Pink Picnic at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and
the desire for Singapore's own pride parade. Pink Dot was a
reformulation of Singapore being nicknamed casually as the little red
dot by the former president of Indonesia, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie
(1936–), and the nickname soon became adopted as an affectionate
moniker for the nation by Singaporean politicians (Chua 1999). Pink
was adopted as the color of the event both for its LGBT symbolism
and because of its association with the pinkcolored Singaporean
citizens' identity card. Therefore, while spatially and politically bound
within the legalities of Singapore, the park has traversed the
curtailments imposed on LGBT Singaporeans. Hong Lim Park is a site
steeped in Singaporean LGBT history, where the illiberal pragmatics
of the law is instrumental in circumventing the sociopolitical
proscriptions on dissident sexual minorities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chua, Mui Hoong. “Whither Singapore-Jakarta Ties?” Straits Times,

27 February 1999. http://www.singapore-
window.org/sw99/90227st.htm

Tan, Roy. “Photo Essay: A Brief History of Early Gay Venues in

Singapore.” In Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated
Cultures, edited by Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow, 117–148.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012.

J. Daniel Luther
PhD candidate, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
SOAS University of London, United Kingdom
Chinatown has been central in the imagining of a gay community in
Singapore. Activist Russell Heng (2001) outlines the emergence of
Singapore's gay movement from the 1950s into the 1980s. Heng's account,
along with those of a few others, such as Roy Tan's (2012), relies on a
positivist interpretation of the development of a gay community in the latter
half of the twentieth century. In both Heng's and Tan's accounts, one of the
earliest recollections of what Heng calls a “gay scene” in Singapore was
associated with Bugis Street. According to Audrey Yue, Bugis Street was
“an area in Chinatown that was an icon of the exotic Far East” (2012, 7; see
also Heng 2001, 81), where cross-dressers, or the ah qua who worked in the
sex trade, could be sought out. On the other side of Chinatown, Hong Lim
Park has long served as a landmark in this imagining. Along with other
streets around Bugis Street, such as Malabar Street, Malay Street, and
Hailam Street, Hong Lim Park was a well-known cruising ground. Tan
notes that it was the “first gay meeting place to be listed in the premier
international gay tourist reference, the Spartacus International Gay Guide”
(2012, 120).

Scholars and activists alike have noted Chinatown's predominance as a

veritable gay neighborhood in Singapore. Tan describes it as a “thriving
‘rainbow belt’ of karaoke lounges, nightclubs, restaurants, bars, hair salons,
bathhouses and clothing and accessories stores” (2015, 2204). Its
kaleidoscope of gay venues extends to mainstream venues and clubs in
Chinatown, such as Zouk, which has hosted an annual “Butch Hunt
competition” since 2001 (Yue 2007; R. Tan 2012). Many of these venues
have hosted community meetings, sponsored advocacy campaigns, and
built capacity for the movement. They have played host to monthly Sunday
forums resulting in at least two maMor campaigns against police harassment
of gay men in gay venues (L. J. Chua 2014). The Attic, a pub located above
the Mox Bar in Chinatown, provided a venue for the Free Community
Church, an accepting and inclusive place of worship for gay Christians.
Many of the venues in this district continue to host theater and arts events,
particularly during IndigNation, Singapore's annual pride season.

Singapore's Illiberal Pragmatism and

Chinatown
It is primarily thanks to what is known in Singapore studies as the illiberal
pragmatics of governance that the contradiction of the rainbow belt in
Chinatown exists. The notion of illiberal pragmatism derives from Beng-
Huat Chua's work on pragmatism as an ideological underpinning for
Singapore's model of governance. Herein, pragmatism is seen as an
ideology that focuses on economic development emphasizing scientific and
technological advances, as well as capitalist and industrial growth, all
mediated by a “centralised rational public administration” (B.-H. Chua
1995, 59; see also Yue and Zubillaga-Pow 2012). Within such a system,
illiberal pragmatism is marked by discontinuities in governmental policies
that are both “liberal and non-liberal” (Yue 2012, 5). Thus, for example, the
Asian Values Campaign in the 1980s bolstered the rhetoric of an imagined
community of a conservative Singaporean mainstream that gradually came
to be increasingly opposed to later “measures of ‘liberalisation’” (Tan and
Jin 2007, 186). Here, the earlier policies promoting family values to build a
national identity find themselves in opposition to newer policies on cultural
liberalization meant to bolster economic development through the creative
industries outlined in the government's 2002 policy blueprint (Yue 2007).
Thus, for example, family values became the rallying call of a public sphere
against issues around homosexuality, whether over the “homosexuals can
change” banner in 2000 (Yue 2007) or the legalization of gambling in
Singapore (K. P. Tan 2003).

The restoration of Chinatown and the eventual formation of its rainbow belt
is an effect of the illiberal pragmatics of the Singaporean state. On the one
hand, responding to the concerns of rapid westernization alongside speedy
modernization, Chinatown, along with Little India and Kampong Glam,
was to be conserved for its “historical and cultural value … as a physical
bulwark against the perceived cultural ‘Westoxificaton’” (C. K. K. Tan
2015, 2208). On the other hand, the pressures of neoliberal development
meant leaving the actual redevelopment of Chinatown to private capital
with “a free reign over actual building usage” (2208). As a consequence,
Singapore's gay district emerged within a narrow spatial geography but with
a complex symbolic imbrication of national pride, cultural difference, and
dissident desire. By 2003 the city-state had become a popular venue for
over “ten thousand local gays and lesbians, as well as regional homo
tourists” (Yue 2007, 149), who arrived for the successful annual gay and
lesbian Nation Party, a protest party held around National Day (1 October).
Singapore had begun to be hailed as “Asia's new gay entertainment capital”
(Yue 2007, 149; see also Lim 2005). The protest party, like the gay district,
was an expression of these factors.

The dynamics of Chinatown as Singapore's unofficial gay district, born of

the commingling of dissident desire, national pride, and cultural difference,
need to be situated within the historical background of the city-state. This
background is essential to understanding both the workings of Singapore's
illiberal pragmatism and what has variously been called the queer
movement's strategy of pragmatic resistance (L. J. Chua 2014) or survival
(R. Tan 2012).

Singapore: A Brief Context

The city-state of Singapore has been variously labeled “non-democratic”
(Huntington 1991) and an “illiberal [or non-liberal] democracy” (Bell et al.
1995; B.-H. Chua 1995). This perspective historically situates the context of
Singapore's transformation from a small fishing village into a bustling
colonial trading port that gained independence in 1965. Singapore's
particular geopolitical context as a postcolonial island city-state entailed its
inheriting of various colonial apparatuses of governmentality, including
antisodomy laws and fierce anticommunist suppression on the Malay
Peninsula. Singapore's ruling party, the People's Action Party (PAP) (which
remained in control of the government as of 2017), was faced with the
monumental task of building a city-state with no natural resources,
including even a dearth of potable water. In addition to its turbulent
engagement with communist and labor parties within the larger geopolitical
milieu, Singapore also had to contend with race riots during the 1960s as a
nascent multireligious, multiracial, multiethnic city-state. Furthermore,
because it was dominated by an ethnic Chinese maMority population in a
Malay-dominated region, the Singapore government needed to walk a fine
line in order to carve out a prosperous economic hub, a cohesive nation, and
a peaceful society.

Singaporean Government and Dissent

In negotiating these various divisive forces, the ruling party (still forming
the government) adopted many of the repressive tools of the colonial British
government in suppressing dissent. One of these tools was the Internal
Security Act (ISA), which was used by the colonial British government
against communist insurgents at the peak of the Malayan Emergency in the
1950s. Prior to independence, the PAP was one of the voices protesting the
ISA. However, soon after independence, and to secure its own power, it
deployed the specter of internal security against all forms of dissent. This
included communist rivals within its own ranks, Chinese and Malay media
organizations affiliated with trade unions and opposition parties, and
members of the government accused of receiving foreign funding, as well
as social activists, community organizers, and, more recently, organizations
with links to terror networks. Besides the ISA, the government strictly
monitors public assemblies, stringently issues permits for protests, and has
made use of the Sedition Act to curtail public speech that might incite racial
or religious tension. Similarly, it controls the media through the
Broadcasting Act and the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act. Rather than
resorting to physical violence, the government deploys the letter of the law
to “suppress and control dissent” (L. J. Chua 2014, 35). This reliance on
rule through law becomes the first obstacle to any dissenting tactic in
Singapore. It affects the registration and organization of societies or
companies, the gathering and meeting of activists, and the championing of
rights over and above those sanctioned by the state.

Furthermore, as Jothie RaMah demonstrates, the state reconfigures “the

profoundly liberal concept of ‘rule of law’ into an illiberal ‘rule by law’”
(2012, 267) by manipulating the three branches of government. RaMah
examines how the Vandalism Act, for instance, was passed in 1966
ostensibly to demonstrate the rule of law but in fact corresponded to the
curtailment of the already diminished opposition party (then the Barisan
Socialis). Similarly, the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act of 1974 was
used to curtail the Chinese-language newspaper Nanyang Siang Pau, while
the Legal Profession (Amendment) Act curbed the Law Society's critique of
the government. RaMah traces the continuation of this process into the
twenty-first century since the 1991 Religious Harmony Act (which
prevented religious groups from engaging in social Mustice activism) and the
2009 Public Order Act were used to further rein in opposition protests on
the streets.

It is in this context of the tightly managed nationstate that Singapore's

dissenting gay rights movement needs to be situated. Within such a
framework, and as part of a movement formed of citizens who have grown
up in such a milieu, Singapore's LGBT dissenters have been persistent,
tenacious, and creative in addressing the state's colonial hangover, which
infects not only its laws but many social norms. Singapore is the only ex-
British colony to have repealed the British antisodomy laws (in 2007),
which had been reworked into more specific laws targeting gay men. Thus,
Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code became Section 377A, introduced in
1938 (Sanders 2009). While Section 377 of the Penal Code deploys archaic
regulations from the ecclesiastical laws of early modern England to
criminalize “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” Section 377A
specifies “gross indecency” among men (L. J. Chua 2014, 38; Tan and Jin
2007, 185).

In an authoritarian state such as Singapore, where the rule of law is

coterminous with the rule by law, how has its dissident gay movement
survived and struggled? The final section of this entry looks at the strategy
of what Lynette J. Chua has called “pragmatic resistance” in the various
campaigns against both the criminalization and the social ostracization of
sexual minorities.

Pragmatic Resistance: Singapore's Gay

Movement
While inconsistencies in government policies stemming from illiberal
pragmatics facilitated the creation of Singapore's unofficial gay district, it
was repressive events in 1993 that led to Singapore's earliest documented
dissident retaliation. In May 1993 plainclothes police officers raided the
club Rascals, located at the Pan Pacific Hotel. Police detained several gay
men who did not carry identification and compelled them to squat outside
the Beach Road Police Station (L. J. Chua 2014). One of the patrons of
Rascals that night, a lawyer, wrote a letter to the police and the Ministry of
Home Affairs, citing the relevant statutory provisions challenging the
credibility of the detention. His assertions, based on Singaporean law,
challenged the authority of the police to detain a person for not carrying
their identity card without cause. The letter stated:

It is particularly disturbing to find Singapore law enforcement

officers behaving rudely towards and verbally threatening
citizens who have not committed any offences. It would also be
in the public interest to clarify the legal powers of police
officers (plainclothes) to demand the production of personal
particulars in cases where no offences have been committed.
 (QUOTED IN L. J. CHUA 2014, 2)

Not only did this letter prompt an unexpected response from the authorities,
it signaled a turning point in the strategic resistance mounted by groups of
dissident sexual minorities in Singapore. In essence, the letter sought to
clarify the law, not directly challenge the police actions. Its wording
carefully seeks this information in the “public interest” and under the
broader ambit of causing harm to “citizens who have not committed any
offences.” Not only does the letter then move to curb the excesses of the
police, which as Chua notes include public humiliation and verbal threats,
but it does so without mention of discourses external to the context of
Singapore in the 1990s. Rather, it seeks to use the letter of the law against
the very enforcers of the law.

It is the strategic use of law, with carefully mediated moves and

countermoves, that Chua terms pragmatic resistance. She defines this as a
context-driven, ground-up struggle against the repressive mechanism and
apparatus of an authoritarian state. This dissident strategy, while more
broadly aimed at rights and equality, is also chiefly concerned with survival.
It emphasizes the need to strategically adapt to the political context, even if
it means shying away from tactics that might compromise the survival of
the movement. Chua argues that “the tactics of pragmatic resistance aim at
immediate gains that change practice and informal policies, not formal laws
and regulations” (2014, 17). The letter in the Rascals incident targets social
discrimination by state actors outside the purview of the law, and as a
nascent first step it was to become exemplary in the dissident strategy in
Singapore.

A few other key moments demonstrate the adoption and utilization of this
strategy by the gay movement in Singapore. These include the second
attempt, on 25 February 2004, at registering People Like Us (PLU) as a
society following statements by the prime minister and senior minister on
international platforms nodding toward tolerance of gay and lesbian
Singaporeans. The second attempt at registration was not made with the
hope of success but to expose the government's hypocrisy and prevent it
from using homosexuality to further its neoliberal agenda. Activist Alex Au
describes the second attempt as a “‘heads I win, tails you lose’ kind of
situation” (L. J. Chua 2014, 91), implying that both the successful
registration of PLU and preventing the co-option of homosexuality were
desirable outcomes. The events surrounding Josef Ng's 1993 performance
of Brother Cane mark another exemplary instance of pragmatic resistance.

CANE (2012), SINGAPORE. PERFORMANCE RE-ENACTMENT BY ZIHAN

LOO OF JOSEF NG'S BROTHER CANE (1994). PHOTO DOCUMENTATION
BY SAMANTHA TIO.
Documentation of Zihan Loo's Performance Piece Cane (2012). Artist Zihan Loo
reenacts performance artist Josef Ng's Brother Cane (1994) where he strikes bags of red
dye resting on top of blocks of tofu with a rattan cane to protest the entrapment and
 arrest of twelve homosexual men in Singapore. Six of the twelve men pleaded guilty
and were given a Mail sentence of two to six months and three strokes of the cane each.
Ng's performance led to a ten-year restriction of the licensing and funding of
performance art in Singapore.

Josef Ng's Brother Cane and Zihan Loo's

Cane
Strategic dissidence in Singapore has its strongest examples in the sphere of
performance art. While performance art in Singapore has been a prominent
cultural form receiving the largest share of funding from the government, it
has also been subMect to severe censorship and repression. In order to bolster
Singapore's status as a financial and economic hub, but also to counter the
negative international perception of the city-state as “puritanical” and
emblematic of a “philistine modernity” (Wee 2003, 85), the government
embarked on a cultural policy to encourage the arts in the 1980s. By this
time, there already existed a theater scene that courted state repression for
its dissident performances. Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002), an important figure
in Singapore theater, was detained without trial in the late 1970s for his
alleged communist activities. Often critically engaging with Singapore's
“top-down disciplinary modernisation” (Wee 2003, 86), theater performers
challenged the state's policies on several fronts, including politics, gender,
identity, and ethnicity, thus inviting increasing repression.

In 1993 repression turned its ire on gay dissident protest performance when
twenty-one-year-old performance and visual artist Josef Ng invited severe
state backlash against his protest performance titled Brother Cane, a
rendering of the entrapment, arrest, and caning of twelve homosexual men
in TanMong Rhu (Peterson 2003). As part of the performance, Ng placed
twelve news cuttings of a Straits Times article titled “12 Men Nabbed in
Anti-gay Operation in TanMong Rhu” on twelve tiles under twelve blocks of
tofu and bags of red dye. He then performed a dance, rhythmically striking
the floor with a rattan cane and whipping the tofu blocks and red dye with
the cane, causing the tofu and dye to splatter across the stage (Langenbach
1997). The performance culminated with the scattering of cut pubic hair
over the central tile, symbolic of Ng's “silent protest” (see Cane 2012). The
performative cutting of pubic hair was strategic, done in near darkness, with
the performer's back to the audience. It relied on an inference, and even as
the audience attempts to piece together what had happened, the entire mise-
en-scène “was plunged into total near darkness” (Ho 2017). Ng ended the
performance by smoking a cigarette borrowed from a member of the
audience and declaring “sometimes maybe silent protest is not enough,”
stubbing out the cigarette on his arm.

Ng's performance incited a flurry of sensationalized media coverage, while

politicians and government functionaries condemned Ng and his work. Ng
was protesting the humiliating tactics of the media, as well as the excessive
penalty levied on the twelve men, who were subMect to caning despite
pleading guilty to charges of solicitation and being fined. The National Arts
Council (NAC) condemned the performance, calling it “vulgar” and
“distasteful,” and withdrew all forms of support. The Ministries of Home
Affairs and Information and the Arts issued a Moint statement in January
1994 banning Ng and fellow performance artist Shannon Tham from
“future public performances” (Cane 2012) and imposing stringent
restrictions on performance art. Ng was charged with committing an
obscene act in public.

Although the ensuing clampdown and media furor forced performance art
in Singapore to adapt, compromise, and even bend to the rules being laid
out by the government, Brother Cane had a lasting impact. The
performance dramatized state violence and the use of excessive force in the
whipping of tofu blocks, and through the subsequent lawsuits, it evoked a
public demonstration of the state's illiberal rule by law. The NAC and the
government ministries also realized the inadequacy of the law on which to
“draw the line” with regard to performance art (Cane 2012).
Brother Cane demonstrated the failure and limits of Singapore's rule by law
though the evocative use of near darkness to hide the entire scene. “The
flash of light piercing the darkness was a newspaper photographer” (Loo
2017) who captured a barely clothed Ng facing away from the audience,
leaning slightly and looking down. A video recording by Ray Langenbach
of Ng's original performance, used in Zihan Loo's 2012 re-creation of Ng's
work, titled Cane, indicates that the mise-en-scène was nearly dark; Ng's
actual actions were not visible. The photographer's flash, visible in the
recording, had illuminated and captured the scene. The act itself was not
designed to be discernible or clearly visible.

Loo's Cane, in contrast, is performed under the harsh glare of bright lights.
Loo (2017) meant for the performance to be “overexposed,” with the
lighting “almost blinding.” Loo explains that the choice of lighting and its
total contrast to the pervasive darkness in Ng's performance was intended to
extend the moment of the photographer's flash. Loo's re-creation has two
notable and powerful deviations from Ng's performance. The first is to deny
the media and the law a “‘live’ snipping of pubic hair” (Loo 2012),
challenging the law for its eroticization and the media for its
sensationalization of a moment they constructed for their own purposes. At
the same time, the performer is completely shaven and entirely nude at that
point in the performance. He makes direct eye contact with the audience, as
though challenging the gaze to locate the obscenity for which the state came
down so heavily on Ng and Tham. In a second deviation, Loo cites
government regulations about smoking indoors and exits the performance
venue to perform the stubbing out of the cigarette. In this moment, the
performer encounters the frenzied photography of the lurking press.

Here pragmatic resistance embarks not on challenging the archaic colonial

laws that criminalize homosexuality, but on confronting the varied and
diverse sociopolitical assemblages of homophobia. These assemblages—the
gaze, the construct of obscenity and vulgarity, the sensationalization and
eroticization of a sexual minority as spectacle, foreign, and un-Asian—are
all simultaneously provoked and challenged. In the process, the
performance does not fall afoul of legal requirements and, in fact, cites
them for ironic effect.

Finally, Loo claims during the performance that his “main interest in the re-
performance of this piece lies in using [his] performing body to recuperate
the public memory of Brother Cane” (Cane 2012; Loo 2012). In accordance
with this recuperation, the performer allowed the audience to record, tweet,
and photograph, as well as live telecast and document the performance. In
doing so, lifting “the usual rule in cinemas and theatres” (Loo 2012)
regarding recording at the beginning of the performance, Loo reclaims the
right to public memory from the strictly controlled domain of the media.

SEE ALSO The Art of Queering Asian Mythology; People Like Us

(PLU); Section 377 and Section 377A; Section 377 in South Asia

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bell, Daniel A., David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, and David Martin
Jones. Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1995.

Cane. A reenactment of Josef Ng's 1993 performance of Brother Cane,

presented at the 2012 Singapore Fringe Festival by Zihan Loo and the
Necessary Stage. https://vimeo.com/37993908

Chua, Beng-Huat. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore.

London: Routledge, 1995.

Chua, Lynette J. Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an

Authoritarian State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014.

Heng, Russell. “Tiptoe Out of the Closet: The Before and After of the
Increasingly Visible Gay Community in Singapore.” Journal of
Homosexuality 40, nos. 3–4 (2001): 81–96.

Ho, Louis. “Loo Zihan and the Body Confessional.” In Contemporary Arts
as Political Practice in Singapore, edited by Wernmei Yong Ade and Lim
Lee Ching, 29–44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Huntington, Samuel P. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late

Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Langenbach, Ray. Looking Back at “Brother Cane”: Performance Art

and State Performance: The Performative Indoctrination Model.
Woolloomooloo, Australia: Artspace Visual Arts Centre, 1997.

Lim, Eng-Beng. “The Mardi Gras Boys of Singapore's English-Language

Theatre.” Asian Theatre Journal 22, no. 2 (2005): 293–309.

Loo, Zihan. “Cane Performance Score.” Submitted to the Media

Development Authority for approval on 15 December 2011; license granted
10 February 2012.

Loo, Zihan. Phone interview with J. Daniel Luther. 2017.

Peterson, William. “The Queer Stage in Singapore.” In People Like Us:

Sexual Minorities in Singapore, edited by Joseph Lo and Huang Guoqin,
78–96. Singapore: Select Publishing, 2003.

RaMah, Jothie. Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse, and

Legitimacy in Singapore. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Sanders, Douglas E. “377 and the Unnatural Afterlife of British

Colonialism in Asia.” Asian Journal of Comparative Law 4, no. 1 (2009):
1–49.

Tan, Chris K. K. “Rainbow Belt: Singapore's Gay Chinatown as a

Lefebvrian Space.” Urban Studies 52, no. 12 (2015): 2203–2218.
Tan, Kenneth Paul. “Sexing Up Singapore.” International Journal of
Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2003): 403–423.

Tan, Kenneth Paul, and Gary Lee Jack Jin. “Imagining the Gay Community
in Singapore.” Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 2 (2007): 179–204.

Tan, Roy. “Photo Essay: A Brief History of Early Gay Venues in

Singapore.” In Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated
Cultures, edited by Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow, 117–148.
Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012.

Warren, James Francis. Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in

Singapore, 1970–1940. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003.

Wee, C. J. W.L. “Creating High Culture in the Globalized ‘Cultural Desert’

of Singapore.” TDR (The Drama Review) 47, no. 4 (2003): 84–97.

Yue, Audrey. “Creative Queer Singapore: The Illiberal Pragmatics of

Cultural Production.” Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review 3,
no. 3 (2007): 149–160.

Yue, Audrey. “Introduction: Queer Singapore: A Critical Introduction.”

In Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures, edited
by Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow, 1–25. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2012.

Yue, Audrey, and Jun Zubillaga-Pow, eds. Queer Singapore: Illiberal

Citizenship and Mediated Cultures. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2012.
Al-Dizil (1994; Thani al-Suwaidi)
WILLIAM MAYNARD HUTCHINS
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Appalachian State University, Boone, NC

A transgender Arabic novella.

Al-Dizil (1994; The Diesel [2012]), by the Emirati poet Thani al-Suwaidi, is
a rare twentieth-century Arabiclanguage work of fiction with a transgender
protagonist. First published in Beirut in 1994, this novella was also
republished there and in Baghdad and Cairo. The story's frank and
sympathetic portrayal of a transgender person made it notorious in the Arab
world, and for several years it was unavailable in al-Suwaidi's own country
of the United Arab Emirates. Since then it has gradually gained recognition
as an important work of Emirati literature based on both its daring approach
to a taboo subMect in a conservative society and its innovative, poetic
language.
 SOURCE: ANTIBOOKCLUB
Cover of The Diesel, English Translation of the Arabic Novella al-Dizil. The cover
of the English translation of al-Dizil combines a vintage photo of a child of
indeterminate gender in front of a Gulfport with an upside-down image of a desert,
drawing on the novella's maMor theme of gender fluidity in an Arab society turned
upside down by cultural transition. Noticeably absent is a lurid image of an Arab drag
queen, indicating the novella's sympathetic, nuanced portrait of a trans character.

Reflecting the author's background in the poetic medium, al-Dizil is a long

prose-poem that relies heavily on folkloric fantasy that at times is divorced
from reality, leaving the events narrated by the protagonist, who is known
as “the Diesel,” open to multiple interpretations. The narrative has a
dreamlike feel that, while not exactly stream-of-consciousness, is
“deliberately disMointed to present the contemporary Arab experience in a
portrait that reflects a self that is split between an image of the past and an
image of the consumer-oriented present” (Nur al-Din 2011; translation by
William Maynard Hutchins). In a 2004 interview, al-Suwaidi stated that the
theme of the novella is the effect of the petroleum age on a community—in
this case, a rural village in the emirate of Raʾs al-Khaymah—at a crossroads
between two cultures. As noted by William Maynard Hutchins in the
introduction to his 2012 English translation,

The earlier culture was supported by relatively small-scale,

artisanal production and embraced a system of values that fit
such a culture. The character of the Diesel represents the
second culture, which proMects the more bohemian demeanor
of a modern-day Minni who has emerged not from a fancy flask
but from an oil well. The author hoped that the reader would
discern the impact of this new culture on a society that was
initially unprepared for it and that was therefore shaken to its
core by it.

(14–15)

Thus, the Diesel can be viewed as a Minni, and that Minni in turn can also be
thought of as oil.

The basic plot describes the Diesel's dawning awareness of a transgender

(male-to-female) identity and the flowering of that identity when the
protagonist becomes a singer and dancer in a dance troupe that transforms
life in a sleepy Arab/Persian Gulf fishing community. The story is narrated
by the Diesel to another character, whose identity is not specified except
that he is male and a childhood neighbor of the protagonist. “The Diesel” is
the protagonist's stage name as a singer and dancer with his sister's
otherwise all-woman ensemble. This name is derived from the protagonist's
sinuous dance moves but—as the author explained—also suggests that the
protagonist represents petroleum and its Minni-like transformation of the
Arab/Persian Gulf from a sleepy, superstitious, closed society to a global
powerhouse (al-Suwaidi, 25 October 2011, Hutchins).

Plot Summary
The Diesel recounts a series of life experiences that brought him to a
realization of his identity both as a performer and as a transgendered
person. The Diesel's first sexual experience occurs as a teenager when he is
raped in a mosque by a wayfarer, who then spends a week sharing a room
with the Diesel at the invitation of the Diesel's father. Far from describing
the experience in traumatic terms, the Diesel states that “this man was
magnanimous and provided me with more paternal affection in a week than
my father ever had” (al-Suwaidi 2012b, 42). This experience stands in
contrast with a more traumatic later episode in which the Diesel's father and
his father's friend pressure the Diesel to have sex with an elderly woman “to
prove what studs they were by having me screw a seventy-one-year-old
woman” (56). When confronted with the woman, the Diesel cannot perform
the act, stating, “I wavered, conscious of a need to demonstrate my father's
virility but also of my inability to obey his body's command” (56). The
Diesel returns to his father with the deed undone.

It is in the company of women that the Diesel finds an identity rooted in the
feminine. At the age of eighteen, the Diesel begins to associate with the
widows and divorcées who are friends with his sister. He states, “We
bonded as if we were family, even though there was a gender difference;
their bodies were differently configured, that was all” (43). One woman in
particular attracts him sexually: “When I saw her, I felt masculine desire
lead my body toward another instinct that reminded me of that wayfarer”
(43). This moment of heterosexual arousal leads to his memory of
homosexual activity. The Diesel then examines his body and determines to
“configure this body in a novel fashion to return the man to his original
memory” (43), which, to the Diesel, is the feminine identity: “Woman is our
original format” (80).

The following day, the Diesel attends a wedding for one of the widows.
Traditionally, Arab men and women celebrate separately at weddings, but at
this wedding, the Diesel is invited to sit with the women by his sister.
Although this gender transgression is at first greeted with hostility both by
the men and the women in attendance, the Diesel's reception is transformed
when he is invited to dance by one of the women: “When I looked at that
woman I felt my hips twitch, and then I was dancing across the floor…. I
felt for the first time that I possessed a woman's body and could no longer
be able to resist this feminine force” (44). The rapture of the dancing causes
him to experience a vision of his dead mother that convinces him she is still
alive. When he tries to convince his father and sister of this, his father
forces him to see a Sufi saint to cure his madness. As the holy man begins
to read from the Qurʾan over the Diesel, the Diesel experiences an
awakening as an artist: “I don't know what came over me after this faith
healer recited over my head, but the idea of singing began to dominate my
thoughts” (47–48).

The Diesel eventually Moins his sister's all-woman troupe, initially serving as
the women's escort but then Moining them as a singer and dancer: “I began to
train my voice for a different type of singing, one the town hadn't heard
before” (67). His first performance at a wedding surprises everyone: “The
baffled males, with their virile scent, surrounded me, while the women
looked at me defenselessly” (67). But as the Diesel continues to perform at
other weddings, he becomes a sensation in the town. He sets up a cabaret in
his home and quickly becomes the artistic director to a large ensemble of
performers.
When the troupe's popularity soars, the Diesel reports that his voice
supplanted that of the muezzin in the community: “I was the voice that
changed many things in their lives” (69). The members of his troupe
“became the town's kings, who could make it reMoice or weep” (70). The
Diesel has challenged a local, repressive version of Islam, not by being
trans but by entertaining people with new music.

A recurring nightmare, however, warns him to abandon his career. When

the Diesel refuses, he is beaten in the nightmare, which leaves him crippled
in his waking life. He is confined to bed for three months before a local
ruler prevails on him to sing at his daughter's wedding, to which the Diesel
is carried on a litter. His return sparks even greater devotion that threatens
the power of the political rulers.

The Diesel's popularity inspires local rulers to fund their own song-and-
dance troupes. When these cannot compete with the Diesel's ensemble, the
rulers ban this form of musical entertainment. In response to the ban, a huge
protest gathering is organized at an outdoor venue. The Diesel is feted as
the guest of honor at the gathering; he is seated on a special chair, and
several people pay tribute to the impact his art has made on their lives. The
gathering becomes a huge dance party, at the climax of which the people
unanimously vote the Diesel as their president. The Diesel feels the weight
of such a responsibility, acknowledging that he is “obliged to rescue this
nation” (84). Yet his reflections on his new public role lead him to a more
personal reflection on the friend who has been listening to his story. In the
novella's most explicit expression of homoeroticism, the Diesel tells his
friend, “Then I longed ever so much for your body” (85).

The novella ends, interestingly, with the Diesel once again encountering the
wayfarer, who does not speak but instead points the Diesel toward the
mosque. The Diesel's response suggests that, despite the subversive role he
has played in the community, he has not abandoned the religion of Islam:
the last line of the novella is his directive to his friend to “rise and give the
call to prayer” (85).

The Innovations of al-Dizil

Al-Dizil is not the first work of modern Arabic fiction to treat an
individual's coming of age as representative of the transformation of an
Arab society in the twentieth century (see, e.g., Return of the Spirit [2012],
by Tawfiq al-Hakim). It is also not unheard for an author to provide a
sympathetic portrayal of a queer character (e.g., Sugar Street [1992], by
Naguib Mahfouz). What is unusual about Al-Dizil is that the protagonist is
conscious of being transgender without feeling angst. By contrast, as
Hanadi Al-Samman (2015, 182) has pointed out, the transgender character
Khalil in Hoda Barakat's novel The Stone of Laughter (1995) “discovers
there is no space for ambiguous feminized masculinity in this combative
society.”

Even if the character of the Diesel represents both a developing artist and
the transformative power of petroleum, his disruptive transformation is not
demonized in this novella. As the Diesel finds his voice as an artist, he
becomes the popularly elected president of his people. And although he has
drawn the townspeople away from the mosque, at the close of the novella
his directive to give the call to prayer demonstrates that his rebellion is not
against Islam, properly understood.

Equally innovative is Al-Dizil's use of fantastic elements in the telling of the

story. Rather than imitating nineteenth-century European novels, al-Suwaidi
channels popular Arab storytelling, the best-known example of which is A
Thousand and One Nights. Al-Suwaidi uses fantasy, based in the oral
tradition of fantasy storytelling, to lend a spirit of subversive transformation
to the narrative. One example is his blending of human and animal in his
characters so that the line between the two is blurred. At one point in the
novella the teenage Diesel is working for a sorceress in an ancient castle
and is upset that a black dog keeps drinking from his milking pail; when he
brings this to her attention she tells him, “Let him drink as much as he
wants … he's my husband” (63). This is reminiscent of the story of the two
brothers who were turned into dogs in the second old man's tale on the
second night of A Thousand and One Nights. He says his two brothers were
punished by his wife's sister for trying to kill him and his wife (Lyons and
Lyons 2008).

Just as al-Suwaidi blurs the binary line between human and animal, he also
uses fantasy to blur the binary line between male and female. For example,
a group of thieves steals the Diesel's father's catch of squid and is observed
by both the Diesel and his sister. The Diesel's sister identifies the thieves as
“spiders in human form,” a deliberately ambiguous phrase that is open to
interpretation by the reader as to what manner of creature they really are.
Not only is their physical form undefined, their gender is equally
ambiguous, as the Diesel observes: “They had reMected their masculinity,
adopted a feminine argot, and moved their bodies as if responding to deep
impulses” (29). These gender-ambiguous creatures start circling the Diesel,
who at this point is a child, and they utter a prophecy over him about his
gender identity: “They placed their hands on my head, like a man blessing
his wife.” They told him, “Since you haven't been able to defeat your spirit,
you must defeat your body” (30).

This prophecy is a reference to the dissonance within the Diesel, who in

body is male but in spirit is female. In a reasoned study of interactions
between gender, law, and medicine in contemporary Iran, Afsaneh
NaMmabadi (2014) attributes a position on trans status such as that expressed
by the Diesel to HuMMat al-Islam Karimi-nia, a transgenderfriendly Shiʿa
cleric. For both the Diesel and this modern Shiʿa scholar, the soul is
decisive; the body's configurations are secondary. A transgender person's
experience, then, is related to “the lack of correspondence between
gender/sex of soul and body” (NaMmabadi 2014, 178). For Karimi-nia, then,
a transgender person's efforts to reconcile this dissonance by undergoing
surgery to make the body conform to the gender of the soul should be
supported, not condemned, provided he does not engage in same-sex sexual
activity prior to the transformation. NaMmabadi (2014) admits being puzzled
by the hard line that Kariminia felt compelled to draw between
homosexuals and transgender people, with the former being unacceptable
and the latter acceptable. At the end of Al-Dizil, the expression of longing
for the body of his friend shows that the Diesel as a character does not draw
a hard line between transgender and homosexual desires. It could be argued
that in this novella gender is a fluid rather than a rigid category.

Reception
Fatima Ahmad Khalifa, a literature scholar from the United Arab Emirates,
wrote that in Al-Dizil, al-Suwaidi “personifies place and breathes his spirit
into it so that place, time, history, and the character constitute a single
whole” (quoted in Hutchins 2012b, 19). In a profile of al-Suwaidi in Arabic,
the critic Muhammad Abu ʿArab wrote that in Al-Dizil “he kneads poetry
together with prose” (2013; translation by William Maynard Hutchins)—
rather than narrative with folklore. In a 2012 review of the English
translation, M. A. Orthofer wrote the following: “Elliptical and poetic, The
Diesel is not a straightforward text. It appears to arise out of not simply a
different culture but also a different writing-tradition—its orality also
emphasized by the fact that much of the text is directly addressed to a
neighbor and ‘mute friend’ (i.e., also the reader) as if in conversation.”

In a review of The Diesel for Three Percent, Lili Sarayrah (2017) called it
“the shortest and most experimental Arabic text I have ever read.” She
concluded her review, saying, “This novella undoubtedly deserves attention
for its highly unique execution and relevant subMect material, and I would
unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone.” Alan Cheuse in his 2012 review
for National Public Radio summarized the protagonist as follows: “He/she
is a dMinn or demon born of the vast oil deposits beneath the Middle Eastern
sands and then born into a fisherman's family on the coast of the Emirates,
born as a transgendered child who grows up to become a highly praised
musician and performer.” He went on to say that “the story unfolds in a
series of vertiginous riffs, on childhood, on village life, on commerce, on
government, on the power of music, … producing a sort of Arab surrealism
with a deep foundation in local folklore.” In his summation of the work,
Cheuse said that “this little work of fiction, with its wild metaphors and
surprising turns, seems as tipsy as a dancer with too many drinks. It
celebrates the Dionysian element in Arab culture we've seen much too little
of these recent decades.”

SEE ALSO A Thousand and One Nights; Transgender Identity in

Iranian Cinema; Transgender Muslims; Transgendered SubMectivities
in Contemporary Iran

BIBLIOGRAPHY
AbuʿArab, Muhammad. “Thani al-Suwaidi: Tamarrud al-shaʿir wa-al-
riwaʾi” [Thani al-Suwaidi: Rebellion of the poet and novelist]. Mulhaq al-
KhaliM al-Thaqafi, 1 July 2013.
http://www.alkhaleeM.ae/supplements/page/c4437224-6670-43c4-a328-
4a66c4bff8f0

Barakat, Hoda. The Stone of Laughter. Translated by Sophie Bennett. New

York: Interlink Books, 1995.

Cheuse, Alan. Review of The Diesel, by Thani al-Suwaidi. National Public

Radio, 23 July 2012. http://www.npr.org/2012/07/23/157248915/review-
the-diesel

Costa, LeeRay M., and Andrew J. Matzner. Male Bodies, Women's

Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth. New
York: Haworth Press, 2007.
Habib, Samar, ed. Islam and Homosexuality. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger, 2010.

Hakim, Tawfiq al-. Return of the Spirit. Translated by William Maynard

Hutchins. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012.

Hutchins, William Maynard. Introduction to The Diesel, by Thani al-

Suwaidi, 9–22. Austin, TX: Antibookclub, 2012.

Khalifa, Fatima Ahmad. Nashʿat al-riwaya wa tawatturatuha fi dawlat al-

Imarat al-ʿArabiya al-Muttahida [The birth and development of the novel
in the United Arab Emirates]. Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates:
Manshurat al-MaMmaʿ al-Thaqafi, 2003.

Kugle, Scott SiraM al-Haqq. Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on

Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims. Oxford: Oneworld, 2010.

Kugle, Scott SiraM al-Haqq. Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and
Transgender Muslims. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

Lyons, Malcolm, and Ursula Lyons, trans. The Arabian Nights: Tales of
1001 Nights. Vol. 1, Nights 1 to 294. London: Penguin, 2008.

Mahfouz, Naguib. Sugar Street. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins

and Angele Botros Samaan. Cairo, Egypt: American University in Cairo
Press, 1992.

Mahfouz, Naguib. Midaq Alley. Translated by Humphrey Davies. Cairo:

American University in Cairo Press, 2011.

Munif, Abdelrahman. Cities of Salt: A Novel. Translated by Peter Theroux.

New York: Random House, 1987.

NaMmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards:

Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005.

NaMmabadi, Afsaneh. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex

Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Nur al-Din, MaMid. “Thani Abdullah al-Suwaidi … Author of the Shock

Novel.” Al-Ittihad al-Thaqafi, 10 March 2011.
http://www.alittihad.ae/details.php?id=23023&y=2011

Orthofer, M. A. Review of The Diesel, by Thani al-Suwaidi. Complete

Review, 15 November 2012. http://www.complete-
review.com/reviews/arab/suwaidit.htm

Paine, Patty, Jeff Lodge, and Samia Touati, eds. Gathering the Tide:
An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry. Reading, UK:
Ithaca Press, 2011.

Samman, Hanadi al-. “Out of the Closet: Representations of Homosexuals

and Lesbians in Contemporary Arabic Literature.” Journal of Arabic
Literature 39, no. 2 (2008): 270–310.

Samman, Hanadi al-. Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the

Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2015.

Sarayrah, Lili. Review of The Diesel, by Thani al-Suwaidi. Three

Percent (blog), University of Rochester. Accessed 20 November 2017.
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?
id=6342

Suwaidi, Thani, al-. LiyaMiff riq al-bahr [So the sea's foam may dry out].
United Arab Emirates: Ittihād Kuttab wa-Udabāʾ al-Imarat, 1991.

Suwaidi, Thani al-. Al-Ashyaʾ tamurr [Stuff happens]. Beirut: Muʾassasat

al-Intishār al-ʿArabī, 2000.
Suwaidi, Thani al-. “Al-Suwaidi, Creator of the Shock Novel from the
Emirates” (interview). Al-Jazeera, 4 May 2004.

Suwaidi, Thani al-. Email dated 25 October 2011a.

Suwaidi, Thani al-. “Riwiyat ‘Dizil’.” Unpublished statement. Email dated

25 October 2011b.

Suwaidi, Thani al-. Email dated 3 January 2012a.

Suwaidi, Thani al-. The Diesel. Translated by William Maynard Hutchins.

Austin, TX: Antibookclub, 2012b. Originally published as Al-Dizil (Beirut:
Dar al-Jadid, 1994).
Drag, Asian
KAREEM KHUBCHANDANI
Assistant Professor, Department of Drama and Dance and the Program in
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Tufts University, Medford, MA

The various forms of Asian drag, their reception in Asia and

elsewhere, and their cultural impact.

Queer and trans Asians on the Asian continent and in the diaspora
aestheticize gender for the purpose of entertainment, combining multiple
performance traditions and historical references to simultaneously invoke
community and perform social criticism. As highly visible figures—visible
because of theatrical gender expressions, online circulations, and staged
performance at festivals, pageants, nightclubs, and parties—Asian drag
artists draw on a variety of cultural references that speak to numerous
audiences at once. By employing syncretic aesthetics, their performances
work in multiple registers that simultaneously engender familiarity,
pleasure, and sociopolitical criticism. The performers examined here under
the label of “Asian drag” occupy several gender categories—including gay
men, otokoyaku, drag kings, hiMra, bakla, kathoey, and trans women—and
manipulate their femininity and masculinity through staged performance for
a variety of reasons: fund-raising, global citizenship, diva worship, income
raising, play, entertainment, pleasure, and self-actualization.

To make sense of Asian drag's critical possibilities, it is necessary to

consider how gender, sexuality, and race have been policed, colonized, and
disciplined (by Euro-Western imperialism, intra-Asian colonization, and
statesanctioned hegemonies) to name how artists invoke and/or interrupt
norms. Asian drag must be studied in context, differentiating kathoey
dancers from diasporic South Asian drag queens, from Japanese women
performing in masculine roles in all-female revues, and so on, as their
identity positions and aesthetic techniques both have and summon different
histories.

ASIFA LAHORE

Asifa Lahore, who calls herself the United Kingdom's first out Muslim
Pakistani drag queen, is a performer, internet celebrity, and activist.
Her involvement in the queer British Asian community includes
working at the sexual health and advocacy organization NAZ; hosting
queer Asian parties such as Urban Desi, Club Kali, and Disco Rani;
creating a series of music videos released on YouTube; and appearing
on various talk shows to speak about her experiences as a gay Muslim.
She famously stages her Muslim and Pakistani identities by
performing in a full burka, stripping into a sari, and subsequently
revealing a miniskirt. In a Facebook video testimonial uploaded in
May 2017, Lahore came out to her online following as a transgender
woman.

Navigating the respectability politics of the Pakistani diaspora, the

xenophobia of a United Kingdom on the cusp of Brexit, an
Islamophobia intensified after the 2005 bombings in London, and
long-standing racism and transphobia in the gay community, Lahore
uses drag to stage politics and to perform her own resilience. In
interviews, she emphasizes the widespread visibility (albeit ambivalent
acceptance) of khwaMa siras (a state-recognized identity category in
Pakistan that includes intersex and transgender people; Khan 2014) to
argue that drag is not foreign to or abMect in Asian culture and
communities. She reiterates this logic in her own name, Lahore, the
capital city of the Pakistani state of PunMab, inscribing herself into the
nation of Pakistan, while embodying the postcolonial nation in the
metropole. Her transition, her strategic references to transfeminine
 communities in Pakistan, her visibility as a drag queen, her purposeful
costume choices, her use of online platforms, and her involvement in a
variety of queer Asian communities demonstrate the ways that Asian
drag artists complicate Western gender/sexuality matrices, enact social
critiques, and build community for marginalized populations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Khan, Faris A. “KhwaMa Sira: Transgender Activism and

Transnationality in Pakistan.” In South Asia in the World: An
Introduction, edited by Susan Snow Wadley, 170–184. Armonk,
NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2014.

Kareem Khubchandani
Assistant Professor, Department of Drama and Dance and the
Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Tufts University, Medford, M0041

Performing Gender: Between Art, Culture,

and Everyday Identities
Many drag artists manipulate normative aesthetics of masculinity and
femininity to incite recognition, pleasure, and discomfort in audiences. For
a variety of reasons, the gendered aesthetics of Asian drag are rendered
illegible because of a variety of historical and political inequities. Euro-
colonial constructs of Asian effeminacy render male Asian performers
already feminine within transnational contexts. While Asian men often find
themselves the least desirable in American gay nightlife spaces that
privilege masculine self-presentation, the legibility of their bodies as
already feminine allows them to succeed at drag pageants that reward
portrayals of femininity (Han 2015). At the same time, their competitors
read them as having a naturalized advantage, thus dismissing their craft.
Furthermore, the legibility of Asian performance styles may not be read as
“art.” At the 1998 Diva drag festival in Trinidad, performances by an Indo-
Trinidadian couple enacting heterosexual couplings from Hindi and Indo-
Trinidadian films did not receive the enthusiastic reception that other
performances elicited (Puar 2001). The audience, reading their dances as
“Must” a performance of their ethnicity, perhaps lacked the intimate cultural
knowledge to be moved by the dance's content, and/or positioned
Indianness as perpetually foreign and therefore relegated the performance to
everyday Indian “culture” instead of a more sophisticated “interpretation.”

Such hierarchical Mudgments also play out within Asia. A Malaysian

transgender performance troupe visiting India in 2004 during the World
Social Forum was invited to perform at a party hosted by the social and
activist group Gay Bombay, whereas local hiMra dancers were not (Shahani
2008). Although hiMras (a feminine gender identity in India referring to
people assigned male or intersex at birth and ritually inducted into hiMra
kinship structures) are often photographed and filmed dancing (at festivals
or weddings or in straight bars, for example), few scholars writing about
hiMras critically discuss the aesthetic or pleasurable quality of their dance
(Morcom 2013). The Malaysian troupe's “foreign” style of drag aligned
them with the cosmopolitan aspirations of Gay Bombay (Shahani 2008,
251), evidencing hierarchies within local gender/sexual matrices and
between Asian countries, bodies, and genders. This pattern repeats itself in
the preference of queer and trans dancers in Bangkok for Korean popular
music (K-pop) over Thai songs; one reason for their preference is the
illegibility of foreign lyrics that allows dancers to focus on movement
instead of words. These feminine Thai dancers draw on K-pop to embody
more cosmopolitan visions of Pan-Asian femininity (Käng 2014). And yet,
even K-pop celebrities perform femininity in queer ways (Oh and Oh
2017), requiring complex layers of analysis to make sense of inter-Asian
appropriations of gender and popular culture.
While some scholars argue for a differentiation between drag queens and
localized transfeminine identities (Bakshi 2004), one can see in the Gay
Bombay example how some transgenders are welcome to perform as “drag
queens” in gay male spaces, whereas others are not. More generally, Asian
drag confounds the assumptions of drag as a gender “crossing.” Drag is
popularly understood as a crossing of a masculine-feminine gender binary
for the purposes of entertainment; indeed, some of the artists described here
insist on being understood as men who exaggerate femininity for the stage.
However, Asian drag does not always rely on binary crossings, given the
varying, evolving, nation- and region-specific matrices of gender and
sexuality across Asia (Käng 2012); gender categories such as bakla, beki,
kothi, and kathoey invoke a variety of feminine male and transfeminine
subMectivities and performances.

Thai drag queen Pangina Heals, a virtuoso of waacking (an athletic dance
emerging from black LGBT communities in California) and hilarious
emcee, is the alter ego of Pan Pan Narkprasert, who speaks of himself as a
gay man. On Sunday nights in Bangkok, Heals hosts a party and drag show
at Maggie Choo's, an underground bar styled as a 1930s Shanghai
speakeasy. Heals's cast features not only drag queens performing for a
cosmopolitan gay audience but also transgender women who know how to
play into the global gay aesthetics of bawdy humor, camp, and glamour.
Heals has also been one of the few drag queens to compete on the Thai
reality TV show T Battle, which more traditionally invites transgender
women to participate (Stein 2017). The recognition of kathoey (a Thai
gender category typically referring to male-to-female transgender people)
by Thai popular media opens up space for a gay queen to perform and
become legible, and that queen then opens up spaces for performances by
transgender women at the gay club night he hosts.

Asian drag can also include heterosexual men. Hailing from the north
Indian city of Jaisalmer, Queen Harish is an exceptionally graceful dancer,
carefully combining in his performances the kneeling spins of RaMasthani
folk dance, daring Indian circus feats such as dancing on broken glass, and
demure abhinaya (facial expressions) of Hindi film actresses. Harish has
long loved to dance and made a career of it by donning women's clothing,
makeup, and Mewelry to perform. Given both his skill and novelty, he was
invited to travel with performance troupes outside India where he was
received by fellow performers as a “drag queen” and thus acquired the title
“Queen Harish” (Roy 2008). In interviews, Harish reminds audiences that
he is married to a woman, has children, and regularly goes to the temple,
meaning he complies with the Indian state's heteronormative expectations.
Performers such as Harish are no aberration, and he aligns with a long
tradition of cross-gender artistry. Indian theater in the early twentieth
century included male actors who dressed as women; these men enMoyed
popularity on stage even when women could occupy the stage, and they
even had their own fan followings (Hansen 2004).

Since Harish's renaming and embrace of “queen,” he has been booked at

gay events in the diaspora such as Desilicious in New York City, and he
even refers to his art form as “drag.” Another performer at Desilicious,
BiMli, describes herself as having a God-given feminine spirit (Malik 2003).
While at the nightclub, she discusses wishing to be desired as a woman, not
a gay man or a man in drag. While Desilicious primarily attracts gay men,
Queen Harish and BiMli are two performers who might be interpreted by
their gay audiences as “drag queens” but occupy quite different identities
from each other, as well as from the gay men who constitute their audience.
Asian drag thus draws from different gender epistemologies and
performance genealogies but also allows for the coexistence, proximity, and
overlap of multiple gender identities.

Conversing with Religion, Race, and Nation

For BiMli, performing at parties such as Desilicious becomes a way of
expressing her feminine spirit. Her invocation of “spirit” reveals that Islam
is one of the lenses through which she interprets her gender and that
dancing her gender constitutes a spiritual practice. For other queens,
performing their religious identity might take a more politicized tone. In
2017 a drag queen named Tara Ryst started to perform at Desilicious
parties. Her name, meant to sound like terrorist, plays with the racist
assumptions—exacerbated exponentially after the 11 September 2001
terrorist attacks in the United States—placed on South Asian, Arab, and
Muslim people (Rana 2011). Performing as Tara Ryst therefore becomes a
way of subversively occupying the sexual and gender aberrance attributed
to Middle Eastern and South Asian people that has been used to Mustify
colonial violence (Puar 2007). At the same time, Tara Ryst's clever song
medleys and salacious dance and costume style please her audience with
references to contemporary Pakistani muMras (a salon-style seductive
performance; S. Khan 2017) and nostalgic Hindi films.

For baklas (a Filipino feminine gender identity referring to people assigned

male at birth) living in New York, hosting a drag pageant becomes a means
of writing themselves into religious tradition, staging their racial difference,
and reframing their positionality to both the United States and the
Philippines (Manalansan 2003). Staging the Filipino Catholic ritual of the
Santacruzan not as a procession in the Philippines but as a fashion show in
New York City in 1992, members of the community health organization
Kambal sa Lusog reinvented the various muses traditionally represented in
the procession. Instead of carrying the flag of the Philippines, the bakla
Queen of the Flag wore a slinky and diaphanous dress in the flag's colors,
sexualizing a symbol usually associated with “virginal and maternal
tropes.” Another bakla styled as Judith of Bethulia carried the head of
George H. W. Bush, the US president, commenting both on the state of US
politics and US imperialism spanning the occupation of the Philippines to
the present.

Even within Asia, queer and trans performers employ drag to critique
national and colonial politics. The Pink Divas, a group of gay, queer, and
trans dancers wearing high heels, skirts, sequin blouses, and other feminine
garb, perform annually at the Bangalore Queer Film Festival. Following the
Supreme Court of India's recriminalization of sodomy in 2013, the dance
group included a sequence in which a drag queen with angel wings pulled a
banana out of the pocket of an actor portraying a Supreme Court Mudge, then
fellated and ate it. Section 377 of the Indian penal code is a relic of
Victorian British law that criminalizes acts “against the order of nature”; it
remains in the penal codes of several British colonies (Narrain and Gupta
2011). During the Supreme Court of India hearings, the Mudges were more
concerned with debating what counted as acts against the order of nature
rather than discussing the dignity and safety of gender and sexual
minorities. The simulation of this sexual act by the drag queen ridiculed the
conservative Indian Mudges' obsession over perverse acts, as well as colonial
law, much to the pleasure of the cheering audience. In September 2018
India's Supreme Court once again struck down the application of Section
377 against acts of sodomy.

Alongside the legacies of Euro-Western imperialisms, intra-Asian

colonization shapes the political and performative efficacies of Asian drag.
In the case of otokoyaku (women performing male roles in the Japanese, all-
female Takarazuka Revue), their debonair personas are determined to be in
excess of modest Japanese masculinity. This exaggerated masculinity
performed by women couples with caricatured performances of non-
Japanese Others in the Takarazuka Revue to secure, via the stage, notions of
a naturalized, quotidian, nontheatrical Japanese colonial masculinity
(Robertson 1998). Interestingly, Taiwanese artists also use drag to respond
to the legacy of Japanese colonization. Fanchuanxiu is a Taiwanese male
cross-dressing genre that uses a variety of recorded music for its artists to
lip-synch. Employing nostalgic enka tracks (Japanese ballads) alongside
other Japanese signifiers, artists invite their audiences to ambivalently
engage with the ubiquity of Japanese popular culture in Taiwan (Wu 2017).

Popular Culture, Circulation, and Virality

The American reality TV competition RuPaul's Drag Race (2009–) has
provided an important international media platform for drag artists in the
United States to stage their craft and their politics. Through sartorial choices
—such as Kim Chi's elaborate take on the traditional Korean hanbok dress
and Manila Luzon's Filipino flag dress and her pineapple outfit—the queens
reflect their ethnic and national heritage (Zhang 2016). At the same time,
Asian queens on Drag Race have turned to racial performances that
do not necessarily reflect their own ethnonational heritage: riffing on the
Japanese geisha, appropriating the Chinese cheongsam, styling themselves
as Latina cholas (part of the Mexican American women's hip-hop
subculture), and modeling “African chic.” These Asian queens' strange
stylings are reminders of how recalcitrant Orientalisms flatten complex
differences between Asians and limit the ways that Asian queens can
present themselves as racialized subMects.

Beyond RuPaul's Drag Race, Asian drag artists struggle to find similar
global success or even a platform on which to perform. Narrative theater
productions function as sites to imagine what Asian drag could look like if
it were given room to thrive. The heterogeneity of Asian drag is enacted in
plays such as The Gentlemen's Club (Mumbai, 2015), about
intergenerational tensions at a Mumbai drag king cabaret, and Miss Meena
and the Masala Queens (London, 2017), about conflicts between South
Asian queens in a British nightclub. While drag is associated with
nightclubs, in India, middle- and upper-class gay nightlife largely bans
“cross-dressing,” excluding both transgender people and drag artists. As
such, artists such as Maya the Drag Queen look to the internet—TEDx,
Instagram, and Facebook—as a platform to accrue audiences. Many Asian
drag queens have “gone viral” online. A 2010 video of a bakla artist lip-
synching Whitney Houston's “I Will Always Love You” as a zombie
haunting her lover has garnered millions of views. A 2007 video showing
the collective choreography of Filipino inmates at the Cebu Provincial
Detention and Rehabilitation Center dancing to Michael Jackson's
“Thriller” has received over 58 million views and prominently features
WenMiel Resane, a feminine performer in a sea of male zombies (Perillo
2011). The Instagram uploads of Apichet “Madaew” Atirattana, in which he
films himself in makeshift haute couture, evidence how online circulation
becomes especially useful to young rural Asians who do not have access to
the monetary resources expected of drag artists nor the urban nightlife
associated with drag cultures.

For Mumbai-raised, Chicago-based drag artist AbhiMeet Rane, web-based

and live performances are mutually constitutive. The acclaimed Instagram
photo series Bad Beti's features Rane styled as twelve South Asian women
and femmes who refuse(d) to conform to gender expectations. Following
the popular reception of this photo series, Rane curated a party at Berlin
nightclub in Chicago titled Bad Beti's featuring Asian drag acts (Moran
2017). The performers (South Asian, Korean, Japanese, and mixed race)
drew from a range of musical references to stage Asianness in this
nightclub: from the Orientalist stylings of Madonna, to Disney's Aladdin
and Mulan, to K-pop, and video-game theme songs. The eclectic musical
samplings lip-synched by the performers in Bad Beti's provide a reminder
that Orientalist visions continue to structure the perception and performance
of Asian genders, but that Asian drag artists can use these familiar referents,
as well as many others, to invite the audience into community and to
critique the colonial discourses placed on their bodies.

SEE ALSO Bakla; Cross-Dressing in the West; HiMras; Kathoey;

Performance Artists in Latin America; Thai K-Pop; Transgender Identity in
Iranian Cinema; Transvestites/Transsexuals

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bakshi, Sandeep. “A Comparative Analysis of HiMras and Drag Queens:
The Subversive Possibilities and Limits of Parading Effeminacy and
Negotiating Masculinity.” Journal of Homosexuality 46, nos. 3–4 (2004):
211–223.
Han, C. Winter. Geisha of a Different Kind: Race and Sexuality in Gaysian
America. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Hansen, Kathryn. “Theatrical Transvestism in the Parsi, GuMarati, and

Marathi Theatres (1850–1940).” Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes:
Sexualities, Masculinities, and Culture in South Asia, edited by SanMay
Srivastava, 99–122. New Delhi: Sage, 2004.

Käng, Dredge Byung'Chu. “Kathoey ‘in Trend’: Emergent Genderscapes,

National Anxieties, and the Re-signification of Male-Bodied Effeminacy in
Thailand.” Asian Studies Review 36, no. 4 (2012): 475–494.

Käng, Dredge Byung'Chu. “Idols of Development: Transnational

Transgender Performance in Thai K-pop Cover Dance.”
Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (2014): 559–571.

Khan, Faris A. “KhwaMa Sira: Transgender Activism and Transnationality in

Pakistan.” In South Asia in the World: An Introduction, edited by Susan
Snow Wadley, 170–184. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2014.

Khan, Saad. “‘We Navigate a Man's World in Female Bodies’: Surviving as

a Modern MuMra Dancer in Pakistan.” Scroll.in, 9 June 2017.
https://scroll.in/magazine/839997/we-navigate-a-mans-world-in-female-
bodies-surviving-as-a-modern-muMra-dancer-in-pakistan

Manalansan, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Moran, Justin. “Bad Beti: New Chicago Party to Empower Asian-American

Drag Scene.” Out, 17 May 2017.
http://www.out.com/nightlife/2017/5/17/bad-beti-new-chicago-party-
empower-asian-american-drag-scene

Morcom, Anna. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Narrain, Arvind, and Alok Gupta, eds. Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives
on Law. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011.

Oh, Chuyun, and David C. Oh. “Unmasking Queerness: Blurring and

Solidifying Queer Lines through K-pop Cross-Dressing.” Journal of
Popular Culture 50, no. 1 (2017): 9–29.

Perillo, J. Lorenzo. “‘If I Was Not in Prison, I Would Not Be Famous’:

Discipline, Choreography, and Mimicry in the Philippines.” Theatre
Journal 63, no. 4 (2011): 607–621.

Puar, Jasbir K. “Global Circuits: Transnational Sexualities and Trinidad.”

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 4 (2001): 1039–
1065.

Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer

Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Rana, Junaid. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian
Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in

Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Roy, Sandip. “Queen Harish Dances in Drag.” San Francisco Chronicle, 22

July 2008. http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Queen-Harish-
dances-in-drag-3276039.php

Shahani, Parmesh. Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love, and (Be)longing in

Contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage, 2008.

Stein, Matthew. “Meet the RuPaul of Thailand.” Ozy, 25 February 2017.

http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/meet-the-rupaul-of-thailand/66713
Wu, Chao-Jung. “Performing Hybridity: The Music and Visual Politics of
Male Cross-Dressing Performance in Taiwan.” In Perverse Taiwan, edited
by Howard Chiang and Yin Wang, 131–160. Abingdon, UK: Routledge,
2017.

Zhang, Eric. “Memoirs of a Gay! Sha: Race and Gender Performance on

RuPaul's Drag Race.” Studies in Costume and Performance 1, no. 1
(2016): 59–75.

FILMOGRAPHY

Malik, Adnan, dir. BiMli. Adnan Malik Productions, 2003. Documentary.

Dyketactics!
PAOLA BACCHETTA
Professor, Department of Gender and Women's Studies
University of California, Berkeley

Radical activist organization of lesbians of all colors, active in

Philadelphia in the 1970s.

Dyketactics! is an anarchist, anti-colonial, anti-racism, and anti-capitalist

collective of self-identified dykes of all colors, founded in 1975 in
Philadelphia. Today, Dyketactics! is most renowned as the first LGBTQI+
group in the United States to take a city to court for engaging in police
brutality specifically against LGBTQI+ peoples. However, Dyketactics!
engaged in direct-action struggle on many other issues, too (Bacchetta
2009).

The members of Dyketactics! were black, indigenous, Puerto Rican, racially

mixed, Filipina, white, Jewish (both white and of color), and Asian and
thereby, for such a small group, somewhat reflective of lesbian populations
in the United States. The members ranged in age from nineteen to thirty.
The maMority of Dyketactics! members were raised in working- class
families, but the collective also included a few members from middle- class
families. During the most active period of the group between 1975 and
1978, Dyketactics! members lived together collectively in two houses in
West Philadelphia. Many of them also worked together at Alexandria
Books, a collectively run nonprofit feminist and queer bookstore in central
Philadelphia. The housemates and other members had met in LGBTQI+ and
other social movements. Most members had come out of prior social
movement formations that were not LGBTQI+ specific and remained
closely aligned with them or simultaneously within them: black liberation,
socialist, communist or anarchist, Native American, student, Puerto Rican
independence, and more. Dyketactics! was part of the most radically critical
wing of LGBTQI+ movements and of many other movements against
colonialism and capitalism, including Native American and black liberation
movements, the movement for Puerto Rican independence, and the workers
movements of the day.

Dyketactics! v. the City of Philadelphia

The maMor Dyketactics! struggle against police brutality began when
Dyketactics! members were brutally beaten by police at a queer labor rights
demonstration on 4 December 1975. Dyketactics! had been called on by its
communities to participate in a LGBTQI+ demonstration during an official
meeting of the city council inside City Hall to demand that Bill 1275, a
citywide bill that outlawed antigay discrimination, be passed. The bill had
been brought up for many years in city council and had been dismissed
every time without discussion. With the hope of preventing this from
reoccurring, many LGBTQI+ organizations came together to watch over the
process. The plan was to sit in the public audience section of the city
council meeting room with banners indicating a strong LGBTQI+ presence.
The night before the session, Dyketactics! members had created two large
banners: “You Will Never Have the Comfort of Our Silence Again!” and
“Dykes Ignite.” That day, they marched together to City Hall and entered
the building and then the council session room, holding the banners.

The council session room was filled with LGBTQI+ activists. It was also
heavily attended by Mournalists. It was guarded” by Philadelphia's Civil
Defense Squad (CDS), a special militarized contingent of “riot police” in
Philadelphia that had been created by the then right-wing mayor Frank
Rizzo, who was formerly the police chief of Philadelphia. Midway into the
meeting, the bill came up. The city council voted once again not to bring it
to the floor for discussion. When that decision was announced,
demonstrators began chanting “Free Bill 1275,” while Dyketactics!
members lifted the group's banners. With the first cries, the CDS moved in,
targeted Dyketactics! members one by one, and brutally beat them up.
Sometimes it took four or five CDS men to control one Dyketactics!
member. Dyketactics! members defended themselves but also fought back.
The CDS men violently dragged wounded Dyketactics! members outside
the session room, down a long hallway, and threw some of them separately
into smaller rooms. Eventually most Dyketactics! members, albeit having
sustained significant inMuries, found their way into the same part of the
hallway. Other Dyketactics! members arrived on the scene and raised a
giant witch puppet that belonged to the theater group Bread and Puppets in
which Dyketactics! had allies. Dyketactics! members began screaming
shrill curses against lesbophobia, the bill, and the CDS, refusing to be
stopped by the CDS violence. Soon the CDS members reassembled, formed
a circle, moved in on the Dyketactics! members, beat them again, and then
dragged them down Philadelphia City Hall's four flights of stone steps. At
that point, the most inMured Dyketactics! members were rushed to the
hospital.

Within one week, six of the Dyketactics! members who had been most
severely beaten filed a lawsuit against the City of Philadelphia for
lesbophobic police brutality. They wrote a press release to explain what had
happened and why they were bringing charges. This was the first case ever
in the history of the United States of LGBTQI+ people taking a city to court
for police brutality specifically against queers. The Dyketactics! six
plaintiffs were Paola Bacchetta, Sherrie Joyce Cohen, Kathy Hogan, Linda
Norwood, Sharon Owens, and Barbara Lipschutz (later Barbara Ruth). The
trial for the case known as Dyketactics et al. v. Fencl et al. (Dyketactics! v.
the City of Philadelphia) took place in the fall of 1976. It received much
press and television coverage. The trial became a spectacle of lesbophobia,
as the CDS's lawyers worked to discredit every Dyketactics! member and to
construct the CDS members as heroes. But the trial was also a spectacle of
dyke resistance. The “Dyketactics! Six” and other Dyketactics! members
arrived together in court each day chanting and singing songs of resistance.
They sat together in solidarity in the courtroom. When it became clear that
there was no chance to win the trial (and the lawsuit did end up failing), the
Dyketactics! Six began to use the trial's publicity to do political work for
the LGBTQI+ community and communities of color. For instance, in their
testimony, as well as in interviews, they included statistics about crimes
against LGBTQI+ people and about police brutality against people of color.
These points ended up in the media, reaching a large audience.

During and following the trial, as a result of the extensive publicity in the
media, members were marked, followed, and persecuted by a whole range
of parties. Many were harassed in the streets, on public transportation, and
elsewhere in public spaces. Some were framed on false charges and in some
cases incarcerated. One, Bacchetta, was pursued on false charges for
supporting Assata Shakur, a black liberation movement political prisoner,
and eventually ended up forced into political exile in France.

Other Actions
Dyketactics!'s political actions are too numerous to list here (for more
information, see Ruth 2009; Bacchetta 2009). Across their many actions,
Dyketactics! centrally denounced Native American genocide and the
ongoing conditions of native peoples; antiblack racism and racist violence,
deprivation of queer labor rights, violence against women, the racial politics
of sterilization, inaccessibility of abortion and contraception, class
inequalities, the capitalist and racist destruction of the environment and all
living beings, and racism within the women's and LGBTQI+ movements.
Some examples of Dyketactics! actions include a series of direct-action
protests at the 1976 Bicentennial held in Philadelphia, including radical
dyke theater and a demonstration to denounce the Bicentennial as a
colonial, racist, and misogynistic event; a Philadelphia citywide women
workers general strike; solidarity work on behalf of the anti–Vietnam War
political prisoner Susan Saxe and Shakur; the liberation and rehousing
(back with their mothers) of children of lesbians awarded by the
lesbophobic, heteropatriarchal state to fathers; a protest to support a lesbian
high school student who was harassed at school; high-profile protests
against snuff films in which women actors were abused and killed; support
for the struggles of sex workers, including those mobilized by the well-
known sex-worker activist Margo St. James; and the organization of an
entire neighborhood by Dyketactics! members living in the collective
Samson Street (West Philadelphia) to protest horrific housing conditions
perpetuated by their common slum landlord.

Dyketactics! also worked creatively to construct dyke music, poetry,

theater, and dyke spaces. Some members were part of the Philadelphia
theater group Rites of Women. Most members did street theater together as
part of Dyketactics! political actions. Indeed, in an early press release,
Dyketactics! affirms that the collective was seeking to “ignite the
imagination” of the LGBTQI+ community (Ruth 2009). The group's
writings were published in Philadelphia's Hera and other lesbian and
feminist newspapers of the day, including Lesbian Connection, MaMority
Report, and Off Our Backs.

Political Significance
Dyketactics! was a path breaker in several areas. Historically, the 1975–
1976 Dyketactics! trial marks the first time ever that LGBTQI+ people took
the city to court for police brutality specifically against queers. Dyketactics!
was against prisons, and therefore did not demand prison sentences for the
accused police officers. Instead the group demanded that the city recognize
police brutality against lesbians and other queers, and provide financial
compensation that Dyketactics! would donate to struggles of the group's
choice.

Beyond the trial, another leading aspect of Dyketactics! was its

development of a specifically lesbian- and queer-situated critical analysis of
settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, racism, and capitalist exploitation.
The group incarnated a heterogeneity of racialized, class, and gendered
positionalities and worked toward the inseparability of LGBTQI+ liberation
with all the liberation movements of the day. For Dyketactics!, every
liberation issue was always already a lesbian and queer issue, and every
lesbian and queer issue required an analysis in which colonialism, racism,
and capitalism were central factors.

Locally, in Philadelphia, Dyketactics! drew links between relations of

power, subaltern conditions and subMects, and the brutalities of police
repression. The Dyketactics! trial became a coalitional site that brought
together in the same space some of the most radical Philadelphia lesbian
and queer activists of the day, including Tommi Avicolli Mecca (Radical
Faeries and the Gay Liberation Front) and Cei Bell (black trans struggles).

Afterlife
After 1978, under the pressure of repression, Dyketactics! members were
forced to disperse, and the group could no longer meet regularly. Many
Dyketactics! members remain political activists and artivists, in
Philadelphia, elsewhere in the United States, and internationally. For
example, one Dyketactics! Six member, Owens, a legal assistant and
longtime black movement activist, worked on the defense team of surviving
members of the black liberation and anti–police brutality group MOVE,
after MOVE's group home was bombed from the air in 1985 by the
Philadelphia mayor's office, killing eleven members including five children.
Hogan became a lawyer; she gathered and digitized the constitutions of all
native nations in the United States and made them collectively available on
the internet so that the nations could learn from each other how to
strengthen their individual constitutions to better protect their sovereignty.
She also engaged in a large amount of pro bono legal work for people in
poverty. Barbara Ruth, a widely published poet, became a leader in the
queer disability movement. Cohen, also a lawyer, walked on the Longest
Walk organized by the American Indian Movement, remained active in
LGBTQI+ organizing, worked closely with black liberation movements and
workers' unions, and twice ran for the Philadelphia city council. Bacchetta,
a sociologist and professor in the Department of Gender and Women's
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, published widely on social
movements. She continued as an activist in decolonial queer of color and
anti-racism movements in the United States and France.

Beyond the Dyketactics! Six, another member, Monica A. Hand (1952–

2016), an accomplished poet and activist, was part of Cave Canem and
Black Lives Matter. She was the author of me and Nina (2012) and The
DiVida Poems (2018). Julie Blackwomon is a widely published poet and
fiction writer. Some of her short stories appeared in her book Voyage Out 2
(1990). She also continued to work with prisoners. Chea Villanueva became
a fiction writer, publishing Jessie's Song, and Other Stories (1995) and the
novel Bulletproof Butches (1997). Pauline Miriam became founder and
owner of Hot Flash, a company that organizes massive parties for lesbians
in maMor cities, thereby building broad community. Many Dyketactics!
members continue to communicate almost daily thanks to a (private)
Dyketactics! Facebook group. The collective also holds in-person group
reunions in Philadelphia every few years.

SEE ALSO Combahee River Collective; Daughters of Bilitis; Lavender

Menace

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bacchetta, Paola. “Dyketactics! Notes towards an Un-silencing.” In Smash
the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, edited by
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, 218–231. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009.

Ruth, Barbara. “Dyketactics! Electrifying the Imaginations of the Gay and

Women's Communities.” In Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early
Years of Gay Liberation, edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca, 137–146. San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009.
Ecology and Environmental Issues and
Activism
LAURAN WHITWORTH
Visiting Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City

The intersection between LGBTQ and environmental activism.

A number of monographs and anthologies published in the first two decades

of the twenty-first century attest to growing scholarly interest in bringing
together queer and environmental studies (Mortimer-Sandilands and
Erickson 2010; Seymour 2013). While gender is increasingly used as an
analytic frame in discussions of climate change (see reports from the United
Nations Environment Programme and the Sierra Club's Gender, Equity, and
Environment Program for examples), sexuality has less often been
addressed in environmental and sustainability studies. For instance, the
fourth edition (2011) of BenMamin Kline's First along the River: A Brief
History of the U.S. Environmental Movement makes no mention of lesbian
or gay environmentalism in spite of the simultaneous emergence of the
environmental movement and the gay rights movement. The first Earth Day
was celebrated on 22 April 1970, less than a year after the 1969 Stonewall
riots in New York City, which inspired annual gay pride parades around the
globe. The 1970s and 1980s saw a proliferation of environmental
organizations such as Greenpeace (founded in 1971) and gay rights groups
such as the International Gay Association (1978; now known as the
International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association).

Some have attributed this seeming dearth in LGBTQ environmental history

and scholarship to denaturalizing tendencies in queer theory, a field steeped
in antifoundationalism and wary of biological determinism, the belief that
human behavior is innate and rooted in biology (Seymour 2013). When for
so long queer people and practices have been characterized as “unnatural,”
as is evident in the phrase “crimes against nature” in antisodomy and
antibuggery laws, it is unsurprising that queer theorists and LGBTQ-
identified people have maintained a healthy suspicion of “the natural.”
Early scholarship specifically attuned to queerness and nature focused on
how rhetoric of “the natural” has been used against marginalized groups—
indigenous peoples, women, people of color, and queers. For example, in
“Toward a Queer Ecofeminism” (1997), Greta Gaard examines the social
construction of “the natural” in Christianity and colonialist rhetoric.
Deploying a queer ecofeminist lens, she elucidates “the ways queers are
feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues
women, animals, nature, and sexuality” (119). Gaard's observations have
served as a touchstone for more recent intersectional queer environmental
studies.

Just as feminist theory has experienced renewed interest in the natural

sciences, especially pertaining to climate change and the Anthropocene
(what some call the current, human-dominated geological period), queer
studies has increasingly turned its attention to the ecological. Beyond
discursive analyses of “the natural,” interdisciplinary scholarship in queer
environmental studies has explored topics ranging from “queer” animals to
the “eco-(hetero)-normativity” found in many conventional environmental
campaigns, such as antitoxics discourse that doggedly insists on a dyad of
sexual difference and traffics in eugenics rhetoric (Di Chiro 2010). Sexual
politics and the politics of the natural have also informed one another when
it comes to the regulation of natural spaces. For example, in the United
States, male homosexuality became associated with urban degeneracy and
was one of several factors spurring the national parks movement, which
aimed to reignite masculine vigor and restore national character (Mortimer-
Sandilands and Erickson 2010) while also Mustifying the relocation of
indigenous peoples (Taylor 2016). At the same time, urban green spaces
such as parks became well-known and heavily policed sites for gay
cruising. Although LGBTQ communities are often associated with
metropolitan areas, contemporary ethnographies of rural LGBTQ life
demonstrate that bars, community centers, and communes have also been
sites of queer resistance (Gray 2009; Herring 2010; Gray, Johnson, and
Gilley 2016).

© OMER MESSINGER/GETTY IMAGES

LGBTQ Environmental Activists Protest on the Grounds of Open-Pit Coal Mines
West of Cologne, Germany, 2017. Holding a sign reading “Queer We Go,” LGBTQ
environmental activists march to bring attention to the impact of coal on climate
change.

LGBTQ Back-to-the-Land Communities

Many women's land communes in the United States were founded in the
1970s as part of a burgeoning lesbian separatist movement that coincided
with growing environmental activism. “Lesbian nation,” one of numerous
ideologies circulating at this time, entailed women establishing their own,
nonpatriarchal culture, which included alternative economies, such as barter
systems and skill sharing, cooperative childcare initiatives, and communes.
Some lesbians took this attempt at “nationhood” literally by Moining so-
called land dyke communities. Ethnographic studies of these groups have
centered on southern Oregon (Sandilands 2002); however, primary
materials collected in the anthology Lesbian Land (Cheney 1985) confirm
that these back-to-the-land communities existed throughout the United
States and included temporary inhabitants from outside the United States.
Much of what is known about this period in lesbian history comes from
reader-written periodicals such as Maize: A Lesbian Country Magazine,
WomanSpirit, and Amazon Quarterly, which circulated between these rural
communities.

These periodicals are rife with ecological imagery and nature-based

spiritual practices. They also shed light on the environmental positions held
by many of these groups. For example, in “A Country Lesbian Manifesto,”
the authors explain that “a lifestyle in which you must keep yourself warm,
fed, and clean without central heating, plumbing, or plentiful Mobs becomes
a gratifying reinforcement of self-respect and strength. Which is for us a
step in learning to live as a positive contributor to the environment around
us” (Sankey and Benewicz 1973, 20–21). The yoking of environmental
stewardship with self-sufficiency evident here recurs throughout this branch
of 1970s lesbian-feminist thought.

One of the more well-known communities, OWL Farm (later known as the
Oregon Women's Land Trust), explicitly outlined its desire to be an
“ecologically sound land-based community” in its charter, which
documented its commitment “to preserve land and protect it from
speculation and over-development, and to foster the recognition of land as a
sacred heritage and resource belonging to all” (quoted in Cheney 1985,
158). Most of these back-to-the-land initiatives were short lived because of
financial constraints and the challenges of shared governance; however, the
development of Lesbian Natural Resources, a nonprofit established in 1991
to support lesbian land proMects, as well as the persistence of several of
these communities today, attest to the ongoing legacy of “land dyke”
culture.

Another queer back-to-the-land group that emerged around this time is the
Radical Faeries, an international network of gay and queer-identified
beings, chiefly male bodied, for whom nature worship and nature-based
ritual are a central part of their amorphous spiritual practice. On Labor Day
weekend in 1979, gay activists Harry Hay, Don Kilhefner, and Mitch
Walker hosted “A Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries” at the Sri Ram
Ashram, a desert sanctuary near Tucson, Arizona. Although there were
proto-Faerie gatherings in the United States and Europe prior to 1979, Hay,
a veteran gay rights advocate, is consistently credited with introducing and
popularizing the moniker Radical Faerie. Hay coupled radical, meaning
“root,” “essence,” and “politically extreme,” with faerie (also spelled
“fairy” and “fairie”), an insulting epithet hurled at gay men but also a
synonym for sprites and nature spirits.

In the face of internalized homophobia and the devastating effects of the

AIDS epidemic, Faeries and their allies sought solace in the secluded
enclaves of Wolf Creek, Oregon, and Short Mountain, Tennessee. These
sanctuaries are still operational today as are Faerie communes in Canada,
Great Britain, France, and Australia. Annual Faerie gatherings occur around
the world. For example, in August 2017 the Global Gathering of Radical
Fairies, Friends, and Allies met at Featherstone Castle in Northumberland,
United Kingdom. The event website underscores the group's commitment to
environmental stewardship: “We meet to deepen connections with each
other and the earth and to celebrate the emergence of queer people as
storytellers, rite preservers, ceremonial leaders, soul healers, community
builders and transformation agents for the whole world” (Radical Faeries of
Albion 2017). Another global Faerie gathering was slated for February
2019 near Phuket, Thailand.

Radical Faeries, lesbian separatists, and ecofeminists (ecofeminism being a

branch of feminism that recognizes connections between patriarchy's
degradation of the environment and its oppression of women and other
marginalized groups) have rightfully been criticized for culturally
appropriating indigenous imagery and practices (Sturgeon 1997; Morgensen
2009). While recognizing the implications of nonnative and predominantly
white American men attempting to free “an indigenous gay nature by
briefly removing to the rural and natural sites that code as indigenous in a
settler society,” Scott Lauria Morgensen's ethnographic work on the Radical
Faeries nonetheless leads him to perceive their culture as “a creative
mediation of the racial, national, and colonial conditions of sexuality”
(2009, 91). Radical Faerie writings and interviews reveal that some Faeries
were aware of the histories of colonization and imperialism (and the role of
hegemonic masculinity therein), as well as their liminal position as both
products of settler society and its exiles, particularly at the onset of the
AIDS epidemic. In fact, exchanges in Faerie periodicals demonstrate that
drawing inspiration from indigenous sources was a point of contention in
debates surrounding Faerie spirituality, which prompted some Radical
Faerie communities to consult and collaborate with Native Americans and
two-spirit persons in the 1990s. Nevertheless, queer environmental studies
and environmental studies more generally still have much to learn from
indigenous climate Mustice scholarship, which perceives environmental
inMustice as a consequence of settler colonialism (Whyte 2017).

Relatedly, Jia Tan employs the term queer transversals as a way to think
“through transnational alliances that go beyond the binaries of West/East or
white/indigeneity” and to encourage dialogue between indigenous sexuality
studies and area studies—in this case, Asian sexuality studies (2017, 138).
Examining the BeiMing International Film Festival's pragmatic deployment
of the term ku'er (derived from the English word queer), which unlike
tongxinglian (or homosexual) is less likely to raise the alarms of
government officials, Tan argues that “both the essentializing of ‘cultural
specificity’ and the accusation of ‘westernization’ ignore the complex
process of circulation and the importance of strategic appropriation in
China” and elsewhere (144). In other words, understanding sexualities in
non-Western cultures only through a culturally specific lens of authenticity
or, conversely, presuming the passive absorption of Western lexicon risks
overlooking the ways that groups actively negotiate these transnational
convergences, strategically deploying (or reMecting) certain identificatory
categories at certain times to achieve certain ends. These geographical and
sociocultural queer transversals mirror the cellular and genetic transversals
and confluences that are discussed in more detail below.

Contemporary LGBTQ Environmentalism

Just as gender and sexuality historically have not been the primary axes of
analysis in environmental studies, environmental Mustice has not been a
chief focus of the mainstream LGBTQ movement, which has more often
been preoccupied with civil rights such as marriage equality. However, the
emergence of a number of LGBTQ environmental organizations suggests
that this is changing. The Queer EcoMustice ProMect (QEP) was founded in
the spring of 2016. The organizers hope that the QEP will be a member-
driven organization for queers living in rural areas, those displaced by
environmental degradation and/or homophobia, and those working in
environmental Mustice organizations. On its website, the QEP cites the
“cisnormative, white supremacist, capitalist, ableist, settler-colonial
heteropatriarchy system” as “the root of environmental degradation,” and
the group contends that LGBTQ populations around the world are
particularly vulnerable to climate change (QEP 2017).

The coalition Queers for the Climate formed ahead of the 2014 People's
Climate March in New York City. The group draws parallels between US
government inaction during the AIDS crisis and the failure to address
climate change today. Holding tongue-in-cheek signs such as “Save the
Straights (and the planet too),” the group participates in both environmental
marches and pride parades. Similarly, the nonprofit Out for Sustainability
(Out4S), which was founded in 2008 and is based in Seattle, Washington,
formed with the aim of bringing together LGBTQ organizations and
environmental groups. Committed to service and advocacy, Out4S funds
community-based service proMects through Earth Gay (a play on Earth
Day); Greener Pride, which promotes environmental action and
sustainability at pride parades; and a biennial international conference
called the Fab Planet Summit.

Another network of activists who incorporate sexuality into their

environmental outreach are ecosexuals. This growing global movement
eschews earlier environmental models of the earth as a mother and instead
imagines the earth as a lover or partner. The term ecosexual emerged as an
identificatory category on green dating sites in the early twenty-first century
as a name for someone who finds nature sensual (or even feels more sensual
in nature), but the word has evolved into an environmental philosophy and
activist strategy. Two of the group's most ardent practitioners are the
performance artists and activists Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens.
Sprinkle and Stephens directed the film Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An
Ecosexual Love Story (2013), which documents the impact of mountaintop
removal on rural communities in West Virginia and Sprinkle and Stephens's
efforts to raise awareness about this destructive form of mining through
environmental performance art. While not all ecosexuals identify as
LGBTQ (Sprinkle and Stephens do), many ecosexuals hope that their
unconventional activism can queer and challenge the environmentalist
status quo. Presenting itself as a cause for environmental misfits—those
who cannot find a home in the mainstream environmental movement—
ecosexuality challenges the exclusionary and normative foundations of
environmentalism.
Similarly, Laura Houlberg criticizes the environmental group Deep Green
Resistance (DGR) for its “transmisogyny,” which she describes as “the
confluence of misogyny (the hatred of women) and transphobia,” hate and
violence “targeted toward trans women and trans feminine people” (2017,
475). The DGR aligns itself with trans-exclusive radical feminists, second-
wave feminists who “[reMect] the idea that trans women are women” (475).
Houlberg attributes the DGR's “green transmisogyny” to its “investment in
naturalness,” which includes maintaining “the white supremacist,
colonialist proMect of the gender binary” (477). In contrast with the DGR,
Houlberg champions Trans and/or Women's Action Camp, a weeklong
trans-inclusive camp where female and genderqueer activists exchange
ideas about environmental organizing and direct action.

“Queer” Animals
Many indigenous and non-Western cultures recognize gender diversity in
nonhuman animals and humans. This is evident both in the presence of
multiple genders and in the acceptance, even veneration, of individuals who
encompass an amalgamation of masculine and feminine characteristics,
such as the mahu of the Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii; the nadleehi and dilbaa
of the NavaMo, a Native American tribe; the guevedoche in the Dominican
Republic; hiMras in South Asia; the burnesha in Albania; and the mashoga
in Kenya and Tanzania (Independent Lens 2015). This gender diversity
parallels the prevalence of gender bending and shape-shifting in myths
around the world: in Norse legends, the god Loki, most often deemed male,
is able to transform into a woman; Hindu mythology contains several
examples of gender variance among gods, as does Yoruba mythology of
West Africa, which includes gods such as Mawu-Lisa, a deity consisting of
both male and female elements.

By contrast, in Western cultures scholars and activists have looked to

science for the prospect of “queer” animals—those who participate in same-
sex acts and child-rearing, as well as asexual, bisexual, trans, and intersex
animals—to counter the supposed unnaturalness of homosexuality and
gender nonconformity. Queer science studies offers an interdisciplinary
corrective to heteronormative presumptions in animal studies manifested by
biologists who dismiss same-sex encounters between nonhuman animals as
anomalies. Joan Roughgarden's Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender,
and Sexuality in Nature and People (2004) critiques the English naturalist
Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) sexual selection theory and illustrates the
way heteronormativity colors how scientists interpret the behavior of
nonhuman animals, including underreporting same-sex activity and pairings
in certain animal populations. Roughgarden extends her illumination of
sexual diversity in nonhuman animals to humans as well, challenging
dichotomous understandings of sex and gender that underpin the life
sciences. Examples of “queer” animals found in both scholarly and
mainstream news sources include female-female mounting in Japanese
macaques; bisexuality in the early life of male fruit flies; the polyamorous
sexual play of bonobos; clownfish who transition from male to female; and
co-parenting by male penguins, such as the highly publicized couples Roy
and Silo, chinstrap penguins from New York City's Central Park Zoo, and
Stan and Olli, two king penguins and former residents of the Berlin Zoo,
who have since moved to a penguin sanctuary in Hamburg. The 2006
Against Nature? exhibit at the Naturhistorisk Museum in Oslo, Norway,
was the first museum exhibition to showcase animals known for
homosexual activity.
 © DAVID HECKER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Gay Penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany. As of 2016, there were three
pairs of male homosexual penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo, including the couple Sechs
Punkt (Six Point) and Schraegstrich (Slash), shown here. Not only did these penguins
show no interest in the female penguins, one of the pairs even coparented an orphaned
chick. Evidence of queer behavior in the animal kingdom stands in contrast to
heteronormative assumptions about the unnaturalness of homosexuality.

While recognition of the diverse sexual practices and pleasures of

nonhuman animals has been welcomed by many LGBTQ-identified people,
activists, and academics, some scholars have warned against the
anthropomorphizing of these complex and species-specific phenomena,
fearing that these “queer” creatures are of interest only as Mustification for
human queerness. Instead of taking human constructs such as
“homosexual” and “gay” and applying them to animals, whose behaviors
are often more complicated and dynamic than these terms imply, queer
environmental celebrations of biodiversity could challenge not only how
humans understand human behavior but also the many ways humans have
underestimated animals and plants as cultural beings. In other words,
“environmentalists and queers [and presumably queer environmentalists]
can engage with accounts of the sexual diversity of animals, allowing them
to complicate, challenge, enrich, and transform our conceptions of nature,
culture, sex, gender, and other fundamental categories” versus merely using
them as Mustification for human sexual practices and gender identifications
(Alaimo 2010, 59).

Animal and plant life have spurred new feminist and queer inquiries into
the ecological. Homages to bacteria, fungi, and a host of symbiotic relations
therein are not uncommon in contemporary feminist and queer theory (Hird
2004; Haraway 2008), which looks to these nonhuman phenomena to
complicate conceptions of bodies and their boundaries and to provide
models of interdependence and coexistence. For example, the human body
consists of 100 trillion cells, and approximately 90 percent of those cells are
microorganisms such as bacteria. Facts such as this have the potential to
queer how people understand their bodies, which may not be entirely their
own. Along these lines, some gender and sexuality studies scholars are
turning to genetics for models of “queerness.” Phenomena such as
mosaicism, when a person's cells reveal different genetic makeups or
genotypes, and chimerism, when a person has two complete sets of DNA or
genomes, challenge notions of the autonomous human subMect by
highlighting nonnormativity and “deviance” at the cellular level (Hird
2004). Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, the guest editors of “Queer
Inhumanisms,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, examine how the boundaries between the human and nonhuman
“rub on, and against, each other, generating friction and leakage.” They ask,
“When the ‘sub-human, in-human, non-human’ queer actively connects
with the other-than-human, what might that connection spawn?” (2015,
186). Queer ecologies and LGBTQ environmentalism offer models for
reimagining the world and its many inhabitants. In an era of increasing
ecological destruction and uncertainty, the need for intersectional and
inclusive global environmental Mustice doubtless becomes more urgent.
SEE ALSO Cruising and Cruising Grounds; Lesbian Lands, Women's
Lands, and Separatist Communes; Rural Queerness

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alaimo, Stacy. “Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of
‘Queer’ Animals.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited
by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 51–72.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Cheney, Joyce, ed. Lesbian Land. Minneapolis, MN: Word Weavers,

1985. Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Polluted Politics? Confronting Toxic

Discourse, Sex
Panic, and Eco-normativity.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics,
Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 199–
230. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Gaard, Greta. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997):

114–137.

Gray, Mary L. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in
Rural America. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Gray, Mary L., Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley, eds. Queering the
Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies. New York: New
York University Press, 2016.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2008.

Herring, Scott. Another Country: Queer Anti-urbanism. New York: New

York University Press, 2010.

Hird, Myra J. “Naturally Queer.” Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (2004): 85–89.

Houlberg, Laura. “The End of Gender or Deep Green Transmisogyny?” In
Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, edited by Sherilyn
MacGregor, 473–486. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017.

Independent Lens. “A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures.” PBS. 11 August

2015. http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/content/two-spirits_map-html/

Kline, BenMamin. First along the River: A Brief History of the U.S.
Environmental Movement. 4th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2011.

Luciano, Dana, and Mel Y. Chen. “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 183–207.

Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Arrival at Home: Radical Faerie Configurations

of Sexuality and Place.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15,
no. 1 (2009): 67–96.

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies:

Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.

QEP (Queer EcoMustice ProMect). Accessed 12 December 2017.

http://queerecoproMect.wixsite.com/qollective

Radical Faeries of Albion. “Global Gathering 2017.” Accessed 12

December 2017. https://www.albionfaeries.org.uk/global-gathering-2017/

Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and

Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2004.

Sandilands, Catriona. “Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience

of Nature: Toward a Queer Ecology.” Organization and Environment 15,
no. 2 (2002): 131–163.
Sankey, Marea, and Martha Benewicz. “A Country Lesbian Manifesto.”
So's Your Old Lady 2 (April 1973): 20–21.

Seymour, Nicole. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer

Ecological Imagination. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Sturgeon, Noël. Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory,

and
Political Action. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Tan, Jia. “BeiMing Meets Hawaiʻi: Reflections on Ku'er, Indigeneity,

and Queer Theory.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23,
no. 1 (2017): 137–150.

Taylor, Dorceta E. The Rise of the American Conservation

Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Whyte, Kyle. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing

Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55,
no. 1–2 (2017): 153–162.