Gay Voluntary Associations in New York. Moshe Shokeid
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situation. I felt the same hesitations that had beset me when Jeff invited me to attend the Golden Shower event. Yet I thought that not participating would be cowardly on my part and another lost research opportunity. I had avoided attending all previous annual and regional conventions and weekend retreats that were advertised by the groups I studied. I knew these were opportunities for more intense social activities and for the experience of communitas that nourished these groups for a long time afterward; nevertheless, I worried about the implications of that intensified engagement with my subjects.
The Bear Pride convention took place at a major Chicago hotel. While there, I was supposed to share a room with three other occupants. I decided to go along and let myself be immersed in the event with no preconditions. I was only slightly acquainted with a few of the participants, who were vaguely aware of my professional interests (see Chapter 8).
It was a lively event, with many activities in the hotel (receptions, lectures parties) and in other locations (the major bars in town in particular). An estimated 1,400 men attended the convention. The participants were constantly meeting old buddies and making new friends. My roommates expressed much mutual affection with each other and showed no inhibition about sex play with either old or new acquaintances or in the presence of others. I let go once and joined a sexual activity with a roommate. I was shocked at first at my own loss of “guard” and its possible implications for my research position, reputation, and self-perception. Had I, at last, “gone native”? But I soon dismissed that notion of guilt and adopted instead a sort of fatalistic approach to these “bourgeois-mainstream” conventions and worries. Was it my “advanced age” that made me develop a more opportunistic approach? I will save the reader my own self-analysis and other defenses. But more important for the subject of my presentation: had I gained, due to that intensified participation, a deeper inner understanding of the phenomenon observed?
Although somewhat disappointingly, I must admit, my “active” participation did not endow me with any special hermeneutic revelation. That conclusion reminds me of Murray’s and Haller’s critiques about the privileged knowledge the anthropologist must gain through participating in sex with informants. At the same time, however, I felt afterward—or perhaps only consoled myself—that I had gained some better credibility with my roommates and their friends. At last I was “normal.” Recalling Markowitz’s report (1999: 167), I proved to the people I wished to observe that I was “a sexual human being.” It allowed me, I believe, to observe later instances of sexual encounters in an unobtrusive manner, as much as to excuse myself without offense when invited to participate. Nevertheless, I have no proof that I might have been treated differently had I not shared in a sexual activity. In any case, I wish to emphasize, I had not consciously employed at that event the strategy suggested by Bolton. I reacted to the circumstances of the event I attended and to a sensual excitement surrounding me. I cannot claim that I was responding to an ideological or a professional conviction.
The Unannounced Observer
Although unrelated to sexual behavior, a more distressing situation arose during my observations of another group at the gay community center in Greenwich Village. I regularly attended the weekly meetings of a few SCA (Sexual Compulsives Anonymous) social groups (see Chapter 4). These meetings, similar in structure to those of Alcoholics Anonymous, are open to everybody, although the discussions are presumed to be confidential (e.g., Plummer 1995: 103–4). I never concealed my professional identity, but as at most other activities I attended at the Center I did not publicly announce my research interests. The presentation of my “true” identity, sexual and professional, seemed a difficult task at the Center. The lack of a single main focus of activity there (in contrast to the gay synagogue) made my persona far more obscure among its visitors.
Actually, I was not concerned at that time about the way I would ever use my field notes from the SCA meetings. For the time being, it was a natural extension of my work at the Center, since for my research I tried to attend as many group meetings there as possible. The issues the participants raised at the SCA meetings seemed particularly relevant to the work and literature dealing with anonymous sex and, in retrospect, to the issue of gay men’s subjectivity (Halperin 2007). Many of the male participants described painful experiences caused by their attraction to the various “oases” of anonymous sex. Never satisfied sexually and emotionally, they could not stop going back to these sites, which by their account seemed to ruin their lives. I became familiar with a few participants of one particular SCA group.
One participant, also engaged in the social sciences, was especially friendly to me. I believed that our mutual sympathy was stimulated by our professional kinship. However, to my great surprise (I assumed he was acquainted with my CBST ethnography), it took him a few months to comprehend that I was doing research. One day, as he saw me inquiring about a particular issue, he burst out in a tone of dismay: “Are you doing research?” To my matter-of-fact response he reacted with words I cannot forget: “I feel violated.” I believe he was offended, in particular, because his late revelation of my professional interest shattered the notion of a shared struggle that had sustained our relationship. He must have assumed that I experienced the same existential predicament that seemed to ruin his life.7 I was shocked and deeply moved by this expression of painful revelation and never went back to meetings at that particular group or to other SCA gatherings.
Could I justify my SCA observations in terms suggested, for example, by Humphreys (1975) and Henriksson (1995)? Would my findings redeem these people, as much as the other presumably “unethical” studies had done before? But as I was pondering that dilemma, I considered a more heretical quandary: had not anthropologists, all along, employed an ethically flawed method? After all, the “natives” in most conventional field sites, although they welcomed the foreign anthropologists, nevertheless rarely maintained a clear idea of the anthropologists’ craft or their forthcoming writings. Why privilege Western people, heterosexuals or homosexuals, when they happen to inhabit the ethnographer’s field? These, I assume, are partly naive and probably unanswerable questions.
Responding to Circumstances
Returning to the two major queries I posed earlier, what can I suggest from my own experience?
First, I gradually made my role and identity known to a growing number of congregants at the gay synagogue.8 In contrast, my role and identity remained far more obscure at the Community Center. The research situation and the constraints I experienced at the two different gay institutions (albeit in the same neighborhood) have underwritten the strategy of my presentation of self in each.
Second, I remained totally “chaste” during my fieldwork at the synagogue. I also remained uninvolved in the apparently “wild” Golden Shower party. But I did engage in sexual activity at a social event initiated by one of the organizations associated with the Center. However, it was neither a change of methodology motivated by new professional convictions nor an ideological transformation that made me adopt a more active type of participant observation at the Chicago convention. Again, I reacted to specific situational provocations and personal incitement.
Certainly, two anthropologists may be affected differently under similar conditions and make other choices. In real life, “circumstances” are not objectively defined and perceived as indicated by the term. Also, the same individual, when confronting similar circumstances, may adopt different modes of accommodation conditioned, for example, by changes of his/her personal status (as a younger or an older person, etc.).
I believe there is no prerequisite to be gay or lesbian in order to study gay people. Anthropologists have usually studied “other” societies. Gay and lesbian anthropologists can offer an insider’s perspective, but that is true for “native anthropologists” in all other fields. However, neither the insider nor the outsider anthropologist is privileged with the one definitive perspective. There are advantages and disadvantages to both practitioners.9
Anthropologists may find themselves becoming engaged with their subjects in intimate relationships that are unorthodox in terms taught at school or unexpected before departure for the field. I opened