An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history.
—ERIK ERIKSON, IDENTITY AND THE LIFE CYCLE
A headline stretching across the entire front page of the Idaho Statesman on November 1, 1955, announced to the citizens of Boise, Idaho, “Boiseans Held on Moral Count.” Two days later, the paper ran an editorial headlined, “Crush the Monster” in which the editors called homosexuality everything from a moral perversion to a cancerous growth. Beginning with the arrest of three men in October 1955, an investigation began into allegations that more than one hundred young men and teenage boys had been involved in sexual acts with a ring of adult homosexual men. The newspaper editors demanded that the entire situation be “completely cleared up, and the [city] premises thoroughly disinfected.”1 Anonymous calls flooded the Boise Police Department switchboard as people turned in the name of any man who was suspected of paying too much attention to any young boy. Parents hovered over their children like hens over baby chicks, and the city’s gay residents realized that a witch hunt was in full swing.
At least twelve men from Boise were arrested for “infamous crimes against nature.” The national news media goaded the public with headlines like “Male Pervert Ring Seduces 1,000 Boys.”2 By the time the investigation wound down in January 1957, some fifteen hundred people had been questioned, sixteen men faced charges, and fifteen of them were sentenced to terms ranging from probation to life in prison.
On November 20, 1955, the Idaho Statesman abruptly softened its position, noting that homosexuality existed in every community and had existed “as long as the weaknesses of the human mind have been evident.” The Statesman declared that homosexuals were not criminals and incarceration was not an appropriate response. It claimed that so long as the focus was on punishing the adult men, the involved boys, now “infected” by the homosexual men, would eventually “travel the same path and carry the identical threat to the next generation of youth.” The scandal limited the debate to seeing homosexuality as a mental illness requiring treatment or as a criminal act that should be punished.3
Coercive sex with anyone, and in particular with children, is wrong. Although the investigation was framed in terms of protecting children from adult predators, the probe was not confined to investigating charges of men having coercive sex with underage boys. Some of those convicted and sentenced to prison were found guilty only of sexual encounters with other consenting adults, their previously private sexual identity accidentally colliding with a short but tumultuous segment of Idaho’s history. I have no doubt in my mind that the events in Boise shaped the developing consciences of young boys who were just becoming aware of their sexual urges. Perhaps former Idaho senator Larry Craig, ten years old and living in Boise at the time of the purgation, absorbed a lesson that sexual indiscretion (or the perception of it) could ruin a man’s reputation.
The same “Lavender Scare” wind was blowing over Nebraska, where I grew up. The Daily Kos reported that in 1950, when I was seven years old, Nebraska’s Republican senator Kenneth Wherry was quoted in the New York Post: “You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives. . . . Mind you, I don’t say that every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But [people] of low morality are a menace in the government, whatever [they are], and they are all tied up together.” Senator Wherry, quoting “reliable police sources,” said that 3,750 homosexuals held federal jobs.4
It was the height of the Cold War and people feared that foreign infiltrators abetted by homegrown subversives were preparing attacks against the United States. These fears penetrated our minds as children, and our games morphed from cowboys and Indians into soldiers fighting Stalin and foreign terrorists. Gay men were lumped into the category of subversives, not because they were considered Communists but because they were thought to be susceptible to blackmail and could be coerced into revealing government secrets.
When people fell under suspicion of government agencies, the question they feared the most was “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” However, a close second was “Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?”
The term McCarthyism, named for Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, was applied to the witch hunts in the late 1940s and early 1950s promoted by McCarthy and his fellow conservatives in their attempts to expunge Communists and homosexuals from American public life. Many conservative Americans were fearful that the country was in a state of moral decline, and gay and lesbian civil servants were demonized as part of the Washington bureaucracy. McCarthyism presumed an overlap of Communists and “the homosexual menace,” and the term has since come to signify all political extremism and civic hysteria. Senator Wherry bragged to reporters, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker.”5 McCarthy’s conflation of cowardice, homosexuality, and treason covered anyone left of the Right, especially those who also worked for the State Department, leading to the popular consensus that homosexuals were immoral, emotionally unstable, and untrustworthy, which justified their punishment and stigmatization.
In June 1950, the Senate authorized an official investigation, the first of its type in the history of the United States, popularly referred to as the pervert inquiry. For gay men and lesbians, the period was one of police harassment, witch hunts, suspicions of disloyalty, and dismissals from jobs, especially in the public sector. Throughout the 1950s in the United States and Great Britain, thousands of individuals were arrested and imprisoned on homosexual charges. Concerns were continuously being raised about the danger of homosexuals in government, citing an alleged lack of emotional stability and weakness of moral fiber as defining characteristics of homosexuals.6
Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was described as feminine, dainty, and weak—not a tough-talking man’s man. Rumors were spread that he was gay. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for nearly fifty years and considered by some to be the most powerful person in the United States, was said to have been a cross-dresser. Hoover hated Stevenson’s liberal politics and attempted to brand him as queer. The term pinko fag became the era’s worst slur, one I remember hearing as a child. Having been born in 1943, during the early years of my life fears about communism were pervasive, particularly in conservative states like Nebraska. Although I had no understanding of either pinko or fag, I knew that being a pinko fag was about the worst thing one could become.
Presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower and his running mate, Richard Nixon, were portrayed as regular guys in favor of morality. In 1952 the incumbent Democratic administration was alleged to be engaged in immoral behavior, and the Republicans finally won the White House, campaigning under the slogan “Let’s Clean House.” Issues of morality were debated across the tables in the coffee shop in my hometown in Nebraska, and while they were intentionally shielded from my ears and the ears of my peers, the fears of communism and homosexuality certainly leaked into our developing unconscious minds.
Despite the mainstream fear, early gay activist groups existed. In the early 1950s, one of the earliest American gay movement organizations, the Mattachine Society, began to challenge some of society’s ideas about being gay. Given the fearful political climate, Mattachine Society meetings often took place in secret with members using aliases. A poll taken at that time suggested that 95 percent of homosexuals would not be willing to take a pill, if one existed, to become heterosexual. Respondents also indicated that they would not wish their own brother or son to be brought into a society that scorned them. The Mattachine Society asserted that one should have no more guilt about being homosexual than one should have about his skin color. The primary goals of the society were to
• Unify homosexuals isolated from their own kind
• Educate homosexuals and heterosexuals toward an ethical homosexual culture paralleling the cultures of the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish peoples
• Lead the more socially conscious homosexual to provide leadership to the whole mass of social variants
• Assist gays who are victimized daily as a result of oppression7
Despite the Mattachine Society’s efforts, at the time I was in high school in the late 1950s, three thousand men were arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department for lewd acts in public places. The police alleged that men having sex with men was occurring more and more conspicuously in public places and therefore was justifiably punishable by the law. The LAPD said its goal was to reduce immoral sexual behavior.
In March 1967, by the time I was just completing my third year of medical school, I heard the national broadcast of “CBS Reports: The Homosexuals.” For most of an hour, Mike Wallace, a familiar figure from 60 Minutes, provided his audience with some of the most disturbing antihomosexual propaganda ever heard. Wallace’s report, which followed the general mentality of the time, reminded viewers:
This much is certain. Male homosexuals in America number in the millions. And their number is growing. They are attracted mostly to the anonymity that a big city gives them. . . . The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His sex life, his love life, consists of a series of chance encounters at the clubs and bars he inhabits, and even on the streets of the city. The one-night stand is a characteristic of the homosexual relationship.8
Airing to hundreds of thousands if not millions of viewers, the report spread an inaccurate and exaggerated portrayal of gay men. I don’t remember exactly what impact Mike Wallace’s report on homosexuality had on me at that time, but in retrospect I am sure that I tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to believe that it really didn’t apply to me except as evidence that I wasn’t gay. I was still a part of that large majority of Americans who looked upon same-sex relationships with discomfort, disgust, and fear. Ignorance surrounding homosexuality was the norm in the 1960s; Wallace later admitted his ignorance of homosexuality and regretted his involvement in the report’s creation.
Movies, too, added to widespread misconceptions of gay people in the 1960s and ’70s. According to Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, in about four out of five films with gay subtexts, gay characters either committed suicide or fell victim to violent death. The movies suggested that being gay was so dramatic, unpleasant, and frightening that it would drive even an otherwise well-adjusted person to self-destruction. Even those gay characters who survived for the length of the film had little in their cinematic representations to be admired.9
The first movie that portrayed coming out in a nonsensationalistic way was Making Love, a 1982 movie starring Michael Ontkean as a happily married doctor who falls in love with Bart, played by Harry Hamlin. Making Love was the first movie to depict gay men as normal and capable of loving each other in healthy, emotionally rewarding ways.10 As my wife, Lynn, watched the movie on television, I sat behind her pretending to do paperwork, riveted to what I was seeing but careful not to show Lynn that I had too much interest in it. In the movie, two gay men were shown as normal and capable of an emotionally rewarding relationship—living a life others might aspire to. The movie profoundly touched the lives of many gay baby boomers by portraying gay men as men who did not have to be victims or victimizers with tragic but inevitable outcomes. In 1982, at the beginning of the Reagan era and before the explosion of AIDS, this film lacked some of the edge it would have had if it were made today, but it took many people outside of their comfort zones.
Making Love was the first movie to depict gay men as normal and capable of loving each other in healthy, emotionally rewarding ways.
Senator Craig, Ted Haggard, and others like them believed they were just straight MSM. When asked if they were gay, they said no because they did not see themselves as infected with the immorality, emotional instability, and untrustworthiness of gay people. They were patriots, capable of tough talk with their masculinity intact. In their mind’s eye, they were not traitors, feminine, or weak. They were men’s men who just wanted a blow job because it was so much easier to find a man who was willing to do that. I know that’s what they were thinking, because that’s what I thought, too.
Why is it that it took a movie in the 1980s to awaken me? Why is it that some gay men who, like me, grew to adulthood during Stonewall believed the propaganda about homosexuality while others rebelled against it? Were some of us more predisposed to buy into stereotypes as a result of some personality traits? Was it perhaps related to our relationships with our fathers, or the influences of our social community? Were the flames of our fears for loss of job, friends, and family more easily fanned? Or did a high need to please and a low tolerance for conflict make us more susceptible to accepting the values handed to us?
For those of us who were born in the 1940s and ’50s, the heteronormative culture was the only one imaginable, and homosex was not seen as real sex. No wonder that until middle age someone like me couldn’t confront his sexual identity—an identity essentially denied by the dominant culture. However, later in my life, I came to understand that each of us is unique. We live in discrete cultures with different values that are impacted by our particular place and time in history; therefore, no universal explanation for sexual expression exists. I now see that how people choose to deal with conflicts about sexual orientation cannot be generalized, but understanding the social and historical context of the time of our sexual development offers some clarity into my life and the lives of my contemporaries.
When I was in medical school, I made and cancelled three separate appointments to see a counselor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. I was very lonely and unhappy. I remember thinking how much I would welcome some chronic, minimally painful, yet terminal illness so I could die a heroic death and not have to live the next part of my life. Although I had some very good friends, I always felt outside the social fabric of my class. I wanted someone to share my life with me, but I seemed to have difficulty connecting with women on an intimate level. I dated some very bright, articulate, and beautiful women. I was aware that some of their mothers wanted them to fall in love with me, although I never believed their fathers felt the same way.
I thought the only logical explanation for why I was still single was my own father’s absence; I lacked a role model for how to be a husband and father, and I needed someone to mentor me through the relationship process. Once my sister told me that she also had some confusion about just what a father’s role is in a family, her confusion validated my own misguided perspective. I hoped my life would come together when I got married and had a regular, acceptable sexual partner, but I was having doubts about finding someone.
The Vietnam War was in full force as I approached the end of medical school—it was a reality I couldn’t ignore. Military recruiters assured us graduating med students that unless we were women, veterans, or disabled, we were not likely to escape the draft. In my junior year of medical school, I signed up for the navy, also taking on the extra commitment of flight surgeon training. I had a year between medical school and the navy, and I decided to interview for medical internships in Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Although unaware of it at the time, I now can see that the unconscious forces of my mind were pushing me toward the anonymity and permissiveness of an urban environment. However, around the same time, I met my future wife. “Rational thought” captured my mind, overpowering whatever unconscious motivations I had. Rather than pursue an urban life, instead I married and moved to Lincoln, Nebraska.
The psychiatric literature I read in medical school did nothing to challenge the cultural values I acquired in my youth. No defense of homosexuality could be found in the earliest edition of the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which listed homosexuality as a pathologic deviancy.
Two psychiatrists, Dr. Irving Bieber and Dr. Charles Socarides, wrote in the mid-twentieth century that homosexuality develops because a child who is barely able to function as a heterosexual seeks to extract masculinity from his male sex partner. This theory, like the one about conversion therapy, suggested that the homosexual man craved the “encircling arms of his father,” and it resonated with me because of my fears that I was not masculine enough to be a real man. In hindsight I am shocked that I could ever have believed either of these theories. It makes no logical sense that two men, supposedly both deficient in masculinity, could expect to extract masculinity from each other. And yet some still continue to believe it.
In 1962, Dr. Irving Bieber headed a nine-year study of 106 gay men, at the time the largest of its kind. Bieber concluded that, “a constructive, supportive, warmly related father precludes the possibility of a homosexual son; he acts as a neutralizing, protective agent should the mother make seductive or close-binding attempts.” Male homosexuality, according to Bieber, is an adaption to a disorder in one’s relationship to other men. Homosexuality develops, in Bieber’s view, because an overly protective mother senses that her son is vulnerable and, fearing that he will be injured, pulls him close to her. She isolates him from his peer group and siblings and develops an overly intimate relationship with him as her favored child. Bieber believed that a child in this position becomes closer to his mother than her own husband does, and the father, resenting that closeness, pulls away even further. According to Bieber, a good father will reassert himself and take control away from the mother. His intervention rescues the child from the undesirable future of homosexuality.11
Although discredited by his professional peers, Dr. Bieber remained steadfastly committed to his controversial theories. Even late in his life Dr. Bieber defended his work. Steven Lee Myers wrote Bieber’s obituary, in the New York Times. Myers wrote that in 1973 Dr. Bieber told an interviewer, “A homosexual is a person whose heterosexual function is crippled, like the legs of a polio victim.”12
Dr. Charles Socarides, another leading psychiatrist whose work I was exposed to in medical school, was featured in Mike Wallace’s report on homosexuality. He, too, argued that homosexuality was a “neurotic adaptation” and that in men, it stemmed from absent fathers and overly doting mothers. Dr. Socarides was one of the cofounders of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). To this day, NARTH focuses on promoting reparative therapy for homosexuals, and propagates the conservative perspective that many in the United States seek to redraw American culture by making being gay the equivalent of heterosexuality. NARTH holds Drs. Bieber and Socarides up as two of its leading prophets. NARTH treats their writings as scripture even though they have been discredited by peers in their own profession.
Throughout his life, Dr. Socarides continued to maintain his position that homosexuality is not a normal variation, despite the fact that his son, Richard, is openly gay and has been active nationally as a gay rights advocate. When asked about his relationship with his father for Dr. Socarides’s obituary, Richard said that “it was complex” and that they “tried to relate to each other as father and son.” Dr. Socarides may well have felt some guilt about absentee fathers, having divorced the first three of his four wives, a fact never mentioned by family-values conservatives.13
In the mid-twentieth century, same-sex behavior was not seen as a crime in most of Europe, but England was one of the last countries to change its laws. Some societies were beginning to question whether or not the interests of the public were being served by prison sentences of up to sixty years for consensual man-on-man sex. Were gay men really twice as dangerous to society as second-degree murderers? In England, prison sentences for same-sex behavior were six times as long as for abortionists, more than twice as long as for bank robbers, and more than seven hundred times longer than for public drunks.
My training in psychiatry—emerging from the homophobic world of the 1950s and developing in the rapidly changing 1960s—followed a rather classical Freudian tradition. Sigmund Freud proposed a structural theory of the brain that said that much of our mental life is unconscious and our feelings are a consequence of underlying conflicts. Freud’s theory hinges on the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the unconscious cauldron of raw drives, particularly sexual and aggressive ones. The ego is both conscious and unconscious, containing the elements of rationality and reasonableness plus the responsibility for maintaining contact with the external world. The superego also contains both conscious and unconscious elements; it develops early and is learned from parents, teachers, and others in positions of authority. The ego mediates in conflicts between the primitive forces of the id and the restraints of conscience or the superego. According to Freud, a person achieves optimum mental health when the id, the ego, and the superego are brought into equilibrium.
By the time I entered my psychiatric training, Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning theory and B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theories were beginning to weaken the hold Freud’s psychodynamic theories had on psychiatry. The focus of psychology moved from the theoretical unconscious to observable behaviors—although it appears we may now be moving back toward a rediscovery of the forces of the mind that operate outside of consciousness.
In order to understand the complexities of how the mind works both in cases of mental illness and in health, I have found most helpful the biopsychosocial model described by George Engel in Science. This model looks at all of the known, broad forces that affect us: biological, psychological, and sociocultural elements. One single factor might weigh heavily or not at all. In my professional experience, I have found that this model can be used to gain insight into how being gay manifests itself within individuals as well as societies. The forces of genetics, childhood development, and an individual’s sociocultural context interact to determine psychological health or illness.14
The forces of genetics, childhood development, and an individual’s sociocultural context interact to determine psychological health or illness.
Previously I discussed the genetic basis for homosexuality. A growing consensus of scientists believes that a biological predisposition to being gay exists but is not a sufficient explanation for the expression of being gay. Arguments that being gay cannot be genetic because their sex is nonprocreative, and therefore would eventually be extinguished, have been countered by the study of other species in the animal kingdom in which there exist nonprocreative individuals. These individuals may contribute significantly to the overall success of the biological community.
The brain and behavior are inextricably linked, and although the balance in psychiatry has shifted to a more biological orientation, we are once again realizing that all behavior cannot be understood only through an expanding knowledge of synapses, receptors, and the circuitry of the brain. The biopsychosocial approach helps us capture the dynamic complexity of each individual by taking the biological evidence and combining that data with each individual’s unique concerns, values, and life context. Whatever the cause of being gay, the coming out process must be approached in a person-centered way, and conflicts related to decision making must be worked out on an individual basis.
All of this discussion of psychological theory matters because all of us must live our own lives. Although a man with same-sex attraction may struggle to discover what is right for him about his sexual identity, he must learn to trust himself to know how his experiences intersect with the lives of others and how his life connects him to the culture around him. The gay man is the only one who can weigh the potential price he will pay for coming out against the possible gains. The benefit of understanding that his sexual identity is uniquely tied to a combination of biology, psychology, and environment should allow him to recognize that he is not limited only to the binary choices of gay and straight, out or closeted. Alternatives related to his specific life and personal makeup do exist.
Cultural context and differences across discrete social groups and historical events greatly impact perceptions of homosexuality. In the fourth century, Plato said, “Homosexuality is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments, just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love—all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce.”15
Years later another philosopher, Plutarch, whose homeland of Greece had been conquered by the Romans, wrote, “The intelligent lover of beauty will be attracted to beauty in whichever gender he finds it.” Romans were largely indifferent to gender and gender orientation, and Roman laws made absolutely no restrictions on the basis of gender. Latin lacks words that mean homosexual; the primary linguistic distinctions in ancient Rome were based on the dichotomy of masculine or feminine qualities, like dominance or submissiveness.16
Some American Indian tribes were also rather indifferent to gender. In those tribes, gay people were described as having two spirits, were considered to have special gifts, served as shamans, and in some cases had a same-sex spouse. Joe Medicine Crow is quoted by Walter Williams in The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture: “We don’t waste people the way white society does. Every person has their gift.”17 Of course, acceptance of homosexuality was not universal in all tribes, and now because of the influence of the dominant culture, gay American Indians are discriminated against in some of their communities.
In some cultures, same-sex behaviors are part of a coming-of-age ceremonial rite, and help men cultivate spirituality and personal bearing in relationship to other men. Shirley Oliver-Miller of the Kinsey Institute wrote about anthropological reports of the Sambians of Papua New Guinea. These reports described a culture of “ritualized masculinization,” where young men fellated their elders in order to receive the “masculinizing force” of semen. When the boys grew up, they married and then became the recipients of fellation by younger boys. All males participated in their adolescence, but as adults, they were expected to marry. At the same time, some Sambian males were described as homosexual in the Western, sexual-erotic sense of that term, and they existed in the same proportions as estimates of homosexuality in Western cultures.18
These examples—Greek, Roman, American Indian, and Sambian cultures—illustrate that alternatives to contemporary Western interpretations of homosexuality exist. The idea that being gay is unnatural, something at odds with dominant norms, only persists because a portion of our society has judged it disgraceful, creating a culture of secret sexual expression. That culture, in my experience, can only be harmful to individuals.
The rich are said to be able to afford their indiscretions because they have the power and money to conceal them. Gay professional athletes, actors, wealthy businessmen, and politicians are notable examples, but in the end, money wasn’t enough to help Lord Browne of Madingley, the chief executive of British Petroleum (BP) who was forced to resign in 2007. As Ginny Dougary reported in the Times, Lord Browne perjured himself about the nature of his relationship with Jeff Chevalier, a gay escort he had met on a site called Suited and Booted.19 Lord Browne allegedly had misused BP resources by making substantial payments to Chevalier, establishing him in luxury accommodations, taking him on holidays, purchasing clothes for him, and setting him up in a business. The House of Lords rejected Lord Browne’s attempt to keep his relationship with Chevalier secret and exposed Lord Browne as a liar, humiliating him in the process.
The rich are said to be able to afford their indiscretions because they have the power and money to conceal them.
Lord Browne, reportedly unaware of a gay subculture when he was young, began frequenting gay bars for the first time in New York City after Stonewall. He relied on the discretion of others to keep his secret. For several years, even though his being gay was something of an open secret, Lord Browne had steadfastly denied his gay identity, a victim of the culture of secrecy. He told Dougary, “It was obvious to me that it was simply unacceptable to be gay in business, and most definitely the oil business.” He is now in a relationship with a man, and said, “I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I feel amazingly fortunate. Amazingly.”20
The closet Lord Browne inhabited is quite different from that of a twenty-one-year-old man from the South who posted this personals ad early in 2010: “Are there any other bi/closeted/gay rednecks like me around?” He went on to describe wanting someone who would hunt, fish, and chew tobacco, but he also required that if his friends came around, “no one would be able to tell. I ain’t out and I don’t wanna be!”
The size of a closet and the thickness of its walls vary from one person to the next. Sometimes it resembles a bomb shelter. Living a hidden life is far more complex for those in rural America, for many immigrant populations, and for those practicing fundamentalist religions, where the key institutions are home, church, and school. For many of them, being gay is seen by the community as an otherworldly decadence, and homosexuality is seen as an act, something one does—not an identity, something one is.
In some of the most extremely fundamentalist societies, heterosexuality is compulsory. In September 2007, while speaking before an audience at Columbia University in New York City, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was asked about the alleged execution of two hundred homosexuals in Iran earlier that year. He responded by saying, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who has told you that we have it.”21 In fundamentalist societies homosexuality is considered evidence of the degradation of American society.
Homosexuality was made illegal in thirty-eight African countries after antisodomy laws were introduced during African colonialism.22 Because the culture in Uganda defines all sex as heterosex, no recognition of a separate gay identity exists. Those who do identify as homosexual are ostracized, seen as a subclass, and are disempowered or discriminated against. As encouraged by Christian fundamentalists from the United States, a law threatening the death sentence for serial homosexual offenders or active homosexuals living with HIV also was introduced in 2009 and debated by the Ugandan Parliament in early 2010. This proposed death penalty law drew international outrage, and the law was briefly shelved when Britain and other European nations threatened to withdraw aid to Uganda. Family and friends who failed to report homosexuals, and landlords who rented to them, would face up to seven years in jail. People working in public health agencies counseling homosexual men on HIV prevention would also face the possibility of imprisonment.
After replacing the death penalty provision with a proposal of life in prison for acts in which one person is infected with HIV, serial offenders, and sex with minors, Ugandan parliament passed the law in 2014.23 In spite of this law, the Uganda AIDS Commission revealed that the proportion of Ugandans infected with the HIV virus is trending upward with a steady rise in new infections.24
Most countries in Africa have compulsory, legally enforced heterosexuality. Anyone wishing to engage in same-sex practices must live two lives. Homosexual activity is largely concentrated in networks, mostly urban and interconnected. In 2015, prior to his visit to Kenya, President Barack Obama was warned to leave “the gay agenda” at home, but despite the protests, Obama met with gay leaders, addressed the Kenyan people, and candidly addressed Uganda’s discrimination against sexual minorities. Kenya’s officials have rejected homosexuality as un-African and identified deviations from heteronormativity as the legacy of white, Western imperialists. President Museveni dismissed President Obama’s criticism of the law as social imperialism and held that homosexual behavior is unnatural, a matter of choice, and disgusting. He went on to say Ugandan scientists had proven that same-sex behavior is not innate.25
David Kuria, a former chairman of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya and the first openly gay candidate for public office in Kenya, explained the situation for LGBTQ people in Kenya by saying, “For now there is no political leader who has shown enough courage even to be equivocal or appear ‘undecided’ on the issue of LGBTQ rights. . . . Poor or weak LGBTQ people will most probably experience violence or be denied services but they will not be connected to a social network that can help them access legal redress. It is interesting that in Kenya today, married gay men face the highest levels of blackmail and it’s fairly routine.”26 Gay men feel imprisoned in their marriages, although Kuria also said that many married gay men love their spouses and most cannot see themselves living in societies where anything other than a heterosexual family relationship is the norm. In rural areas of Africa there is a particularly high demand for the appearance of heteronormativity.
On my MagneticFire blog, a man in India sent me a letter that said “I am a thirty year old Indian, married and have one son. I am sexually attracted to older men, but I love my wife and do have sex with her. How can I make this stop?” Although homosexuality appears in old scriptures and paintings, today homosexuality is a taboo and highly stigmatized subject; same-sex behavior is hidden and can lead to harassment by police. The criminalization of homosexuality in India dates back to 1860, when the country was still under British rule, but in 2009, the New Delhi High Court repealed Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, decriminalizing consensual sex between LGBTQ adults. The Supreme Court threw out that ruling in 2013, effectively once again recriminalizing “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” On February 5, 2016, activists were given new hope when India’s Supreme Court agreed to reconsider the 2013 ruling.27
In Japan many people live by the rule “If it smells, put a lid on it.” According to one interviewee who had spent considerable time in Japan, same-sex activity is compartmentalized, and the Japanese are more comfortable than Americans in living with contradictions, as long as order is maintained. Japanese men are expected to maintain a respectable life on the surface. The gay community in Japan is less public than the community in the United States, but finding gay bars and saunas that serve as gathering places for men of all ages is not difficult. Not all of the clientele are gay, and many of them are looking for a quick sexual release. School bullying is notorious in Japan and has been for decades. For LGBTQ youth in particular, the harassment, threats, and even violence in schools can be unbearable.
Gay characters appear on Japanese television, but the rule is that no matter how entertaining, same-sex behavior is still perverse. Gay men are often seen in the same category as prostitutes, bar girls, and the criminal underground. But change is coming. In 2016, the Shibuya and the Setagaya wards in Tokyo became the first municipalities in Japan to pass an ordinance that would acknowledge same-sex unions as equivalent to marriage, while cities outside Tokyo announced possible future arrangements for same-sex partnerships.28
Asian immigrants are often noted for having a strong work ethic, humility, and strong family ties, but these traits also may contribute to their difficulty in coming out. I received this correspondence from a thirty-five-year-old man who immigrated to the United States from Vietnam with his family when he was nine years old:
I am out to my friends as bisexual, but as for my family, it’s don’t ask, don’t tell. . . . Basically I am prioritizing one battle at a time. I did tell my father that I am bisexual and he was somewhat supportive and hoping that I will like girls more than guys. Growing up being discriminated [against] and coming to the USA, it’s harder for me to speak out about [being a part of a] sexual minority because of fearing that I, too, will get discriminated against. So I hide in the closet until the time is right. We waste too much time and energy on sexual orientation and shame.
In analyzing cross-cultural notions of heterosexuality, some commonalities arise: In many cultures the homosexual male who is more feminine and acts as the passive sexual partner is typically devalued, just as many women in those cultures are. The transgressions of those who are the active partner are more easily forgiven or overlooked. As in the United States, some men simply opt out when adult expectations force heterosexual dating and marriage after an age where same-sex play may have been ignored or tolerated. Other men engage in “trade,” hiring male partners for sex in which the hirer is almost exclusively the penetrative partner, an acceptable masculine behavior. Some men will seek out anonymous sexual partners in public venues. Often they do not discuss it with others, so a culture of secrecy exists worldwide.
Gay immigrants experience a kind of double jeopardy by having difficulty establishing an authentic sexual identity that is different not only from mainstream American culture but also from the family values and ancient cultural traditions of their parents. This exposes them to the possibility of multiple oppressions: racism, sexism, generational clashes, and stigmatization from both outside and within their immigrant communities. Because of this, they may resist being labeled gay and struggle with a decision about whether or not to come out.
Immigrant families are frequently tied together much more tightly than other families in America, and being gay may be seen as deviant and bringing dishonor and shame to the family. For many immigrants, coming out involves setting aside cultural mandates and being forced to choose either a gay identity or an ethnic one. Coming out can mean rejection from their families as well as from their community of friends who have immigrated to the United States. Male children have strong obligations to marry, create families, and sacrifice their own interests for the benefit and tranquility of the family.
For many ethnic minorities, coming out involves often having to decide whether their ethnic identity or their sexual identity will take precedence. If they choose their ethnic group, they will surround themselves with homonegativism; if they choose a gay identity, they may lose the social support of their primary ethnic group and have no buffer against racism.
Closets are dangerous places when it comes to issues of public health. Criminalization of same-sex activity generally creates an underground of sexual activity. Where acceptance of being gay is low, gay people are likely to have more concurrent heterosexual relationships, increasing the risks for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon report that where acceptance of gays is higher, HIV rates are lower, and where tolerance—although most in the LGBTQ community would prefer they had used the word acceptance—is low, the HIV rate of men who have sex with other men in underground cruising areas, such as parks, beaches, and restrooms, is higher. Their findings were thought to have so much potential impact on policy decisions that in 2009, Emory University published the report on its website prior to its publication in a peer-reviewed journal.29
The culture of secrecy can lead gay men to engage in illicit sex in clandestine, sometimes sleazy venues. The risk of exposing themselves and their partners to disease is high, not to mention the risk of public humiliation. Living a secret can only reinforce a sense of shame and guilt. But that isn’t to say that these encounters are purely anonymous. In those societies where heterosexual expression is mandatory and oppression is extreme, gay men and women create underground communities, invisible gay spaces.
Sometimes we believe that we have made great progress in our understanding and acceptance of being gay over the last decades. After seeing Mike Wallace’s 1967 CBS report, I never could have imagined that I would one day live in a place where Doug and I could be legally married. That said, many of the same social forces that caused me to delay coming out until midlife continue to operate, and in some places those forces are more severe than anything I had to encounter. However, as my personal experience attests, life-changing societal evolution does happen. If it didn’t, women would still be waiting to vote and we might all still be either slaves or slaveholders. American culture for gay men and women is far from perfect, but things are moving in a positive direction.