Gay Voluntary Associations in New York. Moshe Shokeid
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closer to the tradition of single-site community studies, ultimately resulted in full-fledged ethnographies on both. In contrast, some of my observations at the Center have been published thus far only as separate articles introducing specific organizations. The present volume incorporates that work, adapted to the leading motif of my account along with additional material introducing my long-term observations in other organizations, the churches and synagogue included.
I present those groups whose meetings I regularly attended for at least six months (except for the Bears) and in which I had the opportunity to develop close relationships with a few or more participants. I continued to communicate with some of my close “informants” and friends who are presented in the following pages through phone conversations, e-mail exchanges, and meetings on my frequent visits to New York. I also occasionally visited some of these groups in later years to observe changes in the population and in their style of activities. Alongside the six chapters that report on group meetings, I include a chapter that represents my observations at the gay religious venues. I incorporate two chapters that explore issues in gay men’s lives: one on the challenge of being HIV positive and its impact on the relationship with the researcher (Chapter 2), the other on the search for partners for love and sex (Chapter 10). These two chapters transcend the individual groups reported on but nevertheless deal with matters given voice in their meetings. They draw on the detailed accounts of a few friends and acquaintances made in my research. However, I begin this ethnography with an introduction on the history, theory, and method of my work (my engagement in the research of sexuality in particular), and end with concluding remarks offering an integrated, analytical frame for the project. I also add some comparative observations on the social reality among gay people in Israel.
I admit at the outset that my work cannot be classified in the genre of queer theory or cultural studies. For better or worse, I am a mainstream anthropologist trained in Manchester, UK, a disciple of the “extended case-method” of ethnographic analysis (e.g., Gluckman 1959 [1940]; Van Velsen 1967; Burawoy 1991), and addicted to intensive fieldwork projects. I share the position of Stein and Plummer that “there is a dangerous tendency for the new queer theorists to ignore ‘real’ queer life as it is materially experienced across the world, while they play with the free-floating signifiers of texts” (1996: 137–38). A similar argument has been recently made by Lewin and Leap: “The primary data sources informing queer theory have been literary or philosophical texts, rather than ethnographic ones” (2009: 6). Instead, this volume is rooted in the ethnographic tradition that aims to present life in vivo.
My position finds support from another quarter: David Halperin, who claimed that queer studies avoided the topic of gay male subjectivity—“the inner life of male homosexuality, what it is that gay men want” (2007: 1). Halperin, however, was probing gay men’s motives for sexual risk-taking (having unprotected sexual encounters—“bareback sex”) in the context of the HIV epidemic. His search employed, in particular, the personal evidence confessed by another gay intellectual (Warner 1995) who tried to answer: “What makes some men fuck without protection when they know about the dangers, when they have access to condoms, when they have practiced safe sex for years, even when they have long involvement in AIDS activism—in short, when they ‘know better’”? (quoted in Halperin 2007: 159).1
I believe my observations have enabled me to penetrate deeper into the motivation that drives gay people (men in particular) from different walks of life and sexual proclivities to invest time and other resources in meeting regularly in the company of strangers away from the apparently more promising and often nearby venues for instant sociability, entertainment, and sexual opportunities.
It is not my intention to denigrate the contribution of queer theory and its practitioners to our perception of the position of gay people and their role in contemporary Western culture (Boellstorff 2007). The questions and discourse they raise are quintessential also for the work of anthropologists. An example is Powell’s opening query: assuming there is “a gay culture” different from mainstream culture, “do we all share the same cultural experiences?” (2008: viii). However, the topic of gay subjectivity is a major undercurrent in the following chapters.
I believe there is no need to expand on my position in the present-day discourse about anthropologists’ search for their professional identity, purpose, and practice. That ongoing torturous self-examination was first triggered by anthropologists’ critical view of their research methodology and the ethnographic authority they command to uphold their presentation of the “natives out there.” It was further affected by the gradual loss of the Third World fieldwork sites as well as the crumbling of the professional borders with the “outsourcing” of the ethnographic method to other disciplines. That process followed the surrender of the anthropologists’ monopoly over the study of culture to neighboring fields of inquiry and to new academic contenders claiming to represent specific social constituencies (e.g., Rabinow et al. 2008).
I find a kindred orientation in Borneman and Hamoudi’s protest against the retreat from the “Malinowskian-inspired notions of fieldwork…. The insistence that all translations are partial, all truths relational and perspectival—sound ideas and assumptions with which we agree—often becomes an excuse for offering superficial translations that prefer surface over depth” (2009: 3–5). Actually, I wrestle with that issue, considering the ethnographer’s comportment when engaged in the study of sexual behavior (Chapter 1) and the reliability of the records presenting the most intimate zones of our subjects’ lives. Thus, Chapter 2 deals with the pressing dilemma relating to a basic element of the ethnographic project—its “authority”: how confident we can be about the “making of truth”: observing and later interpreting our fieldwork material?
I have not discovered a new road to respond to the yearning for a gratifying and sin-free ethnographic authority under the auspices of what is often called contemporary anthropology. I believe I have been doing “relevant anthropology” from the very beginning of my career, changing my research strategies with ongoing transformations in the professional scene (Shokeid 2007). The circumstances of my apprenticeship impelled me to study social groups close to home (Moroccan Jewish immigrants and Arabs in Israel); later projects in the United States were similarly relevant to my social and intellectual interests (Israeli émigrés in New York and gay Jews). Ironically, however, my work among LGBT people and institutions in the Village Center, and in the churches in particular, has granted me the “classical” role of the anthropologist who sailed to a site away from home to study “another culture.”
I am inclined, however, to adopt an outsider’s perspective (Westbrook 2008) on the present situation of ethnographic work and consider my role in the LGBT field in terms of a “navigator.” Reflecting on the abandonment of the ethnographer’s long-term study in one remote site, Westbrook, a scholar of law who carried on a fruitful dialogue with George Marcus, claims that anthropologists are often engaged in the creation of “research circumstances,” and their major effort is to convince the subjects they meet on their trail to share with them their world outlook and their social and personal narratives. Therefore, he concludes, the present day ethnographic encounter—while navigating research circumstances—is “thin” compared with the past tradition of “thick description.” Although not an anthropologist, Westbrook seems to have grasped some evolutionary developments in the craft of his academic neighbors. This line of thought, which seems to reflect my present project and theoretical agenda, has also been pinpointed by other anthropologists who shared similar experiences (e.g., Hannerz 2010).
As an Israeli’s report on a segment of U.S. society, my work, I trust, fits within the long history of “foreign-travelers” writing on America. Notable in this tradition is also Society in America (1994 [1837]) by Harriet Martineau, who, while sailing across the Atlantic to begin her research, drafted a guide to the study of foreign cultures: How to Observe Manners and Morals (1838). Lipset described that work as “perhaps, the first book on the methodology of social research in the then still unborn disciplines of sociology and anthropology” (1994: