Gay Voluntary Associations in New York: Public Sharing and Private Lives

Introduction

In the early 1980s my family and I lived in Queens, New York, where I studied the Israeli immigrant community, nicknamed Yordim (Hebrew for those who go down; singular, Yored). I found that the Israelis there were reluctant to admit that their relocation to the United States was more than temporary. As a result, they organized nostalgic get-togethers, what I defined as one-night-stand ethnicity, but did not form the voluntary associations—often leading to enduring social institutions—that other earlier and present-day, Jewish and non-Jewish permanent immigrants had (Shokeid 1988). It was during that time that I was invited to attend a service at the gay and lesbian synagogue, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) in the West Village of Manhattan. I was fascinated by that social experience, and a few years later (1989) I returned to New York and started research at CBST. The period of my observation there coincided with a time of challenge for the synagogue. It was faced with the question of whether, as a lay-led, all-volunteer organization, it could still continue to meet the needs of its now sizeable congregation, many of whom were ill with AIDS. Or would it have to hire a full-time paid rabbi and paid staff, thus transforming its founding social bricks and the ethos of a voluntary organization (Shokeid 2003 [1995], 2001)?

In the mid-1990s, while still maintaining contact with CBST, I broadened my field of interest to the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in the West Village (the Center). Starting in 1995, during sabbaticals and research fellowships, I observed a number of the voluntary groups holding meetings there. Located in a massive New York landmark school building (on Thirteenth Street), the Center hosts a wide variety of organizations and activities. Actually, anyone can ask to use the Center’s space in order to initiate a new activity aimed to serve the interests and welfare of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. The annual report for 1996, for example, listed about 120 groups that met on its premises. In addition, the Center promotes many public events, discussions, lectures, exhibitions, parties, dances, and more. The website indicates that established in 1983 the Center has grown to become the second largest LGBT community center in the world as of 2010.

My diverse cohort was composed of seniors, bisexuals, Radical Fairies, sexual compulsives, men attracted across race, Leathermen, Bears, Gay Fathers, men engaging in nonsexual physical affection (Gentle Men), and Positive Body (engaging in safe-sex education, advertising its meetings as Sex Talk). At this time I also extended my research on the gay community beyond the Center to churches active in the city, offshoots of various denominations: Protestant—the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC); Catholic—Dignity; and the Unity Fellowship Church—a black, Baptist-style congregation. Taken together, this diverse group of sites afforded the opportunity to observe a wide section of the gay community across ethnic, cultural, and social divides. It also provided a chance to become acquainted with individuals from a variety of backgrounds, a number of whom have become close friends and trusted informants. My engagement with these institutions continued in later years (until 2010) on subsequent longer and shorter visits.

Many social scientists—beginning, most famously, with de Tocqueville (1956 [1835])—have observed what has often been deemed a unique characteristic of American society: the propensity to form voluntary associations and civic organizations (e.g., Huizinga 1972 [1927]; Schlesinger 1944; Bellah et al. 1985; Ginsburg 1989; Wuthnow 1994; Sanjek 1998; Gamm and Putnam 1999; Curtis, Baer, and Grabb 2001). None of these studies, however, have encompassed the gay and lesbian community. Instead, ethnographic work on gay life in the United States, mostly by American scholars, has typically taken one of two directions. The first, much affected in later years by the AIDS epidemic, is the study of sites and institutions that offer a safe space for social interaction, in particular, for anonymous sex (e.g., Humphreys 1970; Delph 1978; Style, 1979; Brodsky 1993; Newton 1993; Bolton 1995; Levine 1998; Leap 1999; Hennen 2008). The other is the study of specific social issues, such as the construction of gay and lesbian identity, history, family relationships, community life, parenthood, patterns of conjugal bonding, youth, language, race, and AIDS (e.g., Newton 1972; Altman 1986; Feldman 1990; Weston 1991, 1993; Herdt 1992; Kennedy and Davis, 1993; Leap 1996; Lewin 1996, 2009; Cameron and Kulick 2003; Faima-Silva 2004; Boelstorff 2007; Valentine 2007; Lewin and Leap 2009).

To redress this omission, I propose to expand the social science interest in voluntary associations to those of the gay community, drawing together observations I have made in a number of its diverse groups mostly in New York City. My aim is thus to reveal yet another facet of cultural creativity representing gay and lesbian life in the United States. However, my research on the Yordim and on CBST, which seemed 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: 7).

If early visitors to America, bringing their outsider perspective, were struck by the egalitarian ethos and propensity for voluntary association (the frequency of groups perceived by the visiting Dutch historian Huizinga as illusionsgemeinschaft, 1972 [1927]: 275–80), what struck me most in the groups I observed was how freely their members divulged to strangers the intimacies, physical and emotional, of their daily lives. Notable as well was the therapeutic language they employed narrating their feelings and experiences.

The mode of discourse I treat as characteristic of the therapeutic culture in America has a long tradition in writings exploring the early success of Freudian psychoanalytic theories and therapy. As suggested by Rieff (1990 [1960]), Freud is America’s great teacher who introduced the psychological man of the twentieth century (8). As a movement, he claimed, psychoanalysis was fortunate enough to achieve a counterrevolution in America. And in daily life, to become a psychological man is thus to become kinder to the whole self, the private parts as well as the public, the formerly inferior as well as the formerly superior (5). Or as suggested by Steadman Rice (2004: 113): the therapeutic ethic constructed around the conviction that human nature is intrinsically benevolent, positive, and constructive. Another outsider, Illouz (2008), commented recently: Psychoanalysis [in America] enjoyed not only the authority of a prestigious medical profession but also the popularity among the ‘lay’ public (35); the therapeutic discourse has become a cultural form, shaping and organizing experience, as well as a cultural resource with which to make sense of the self and social relations (56), making private selfhood a narrative told and consumed publicly (239).

I hope my subject of interest is not associated with the staged shows on television, those displaying the stripping of the inner personal lives of volunteers in front of innumerable one-night anonymous spectators in the studio theater and beyond, such as on Oprah Winfrey’s programs. I consider these staged performances a new form of the old freak shows that paraded on stage unfortunate disfigured humans such as the Elephant Man. Kaminer (1992) and Plummer (1995) have critically reviewed the confessional television talk shows as well as the American culture of recovery groups as centers of sexual storytellers offering instant therapies.

Perhaps paradoxically, the smaller, closer-knit, and far more communal Israeli society does not foster, even among close friends, the confessional-intimate atmosphere I witnessed. Although Israelis are assumed to have no inhibitions about inquiring into the lives of others and are well known for their straight-talk (dugri) style of conversation (Katriel 1986), nevertheless, they are reluctant to expose personal intimate matters. This hesitancy extends to the professional realm as well. The ethos that promotes both individual self-assertion and enduring social commitments (e.g., Dominguez 1989; Furman 1994; Illouz 2008) operates against Israelis seeking therapeutic help by way of revealing their true selves and as a strategy to improve their social skills.

Given this background, I wondered what explained the free sharing of personal information and the moving expressions of empathy that I witnessed in all the groups observed. Did the common sexual orientation connect the participants and heighten the emotional resonance of their disclosures? It seemed so. But still, one ponders over what it is that leads mature, educated, and frequently quite successful people to seek trust and friendship in the company of strangers gathered at often run-down buildings for lay-led meetings conducted without professional direction. I wondered, like Umberto Eco (1986) in Disney World, what the visitor takes away from these experiences. Is it fantasy, or is it something real? And if the latter, what is the reality produced in these meetings? In sum, I repeat Halperin’s archetypal query, what do gay men want? albeit addressing a field of behavior that only marginally involves intense sexual activity.

My purpose is to reveal a missing block in the vast corpus of research in the house of anthropological queer studies (Boellstorff 2007). I consider my observations and interpretation of affective relationships displayed in voluntary fellowships, in specific issue-oriented groups composed of strangers, or among circles of close friends as essential components of the dynamics that impact gay identity and constitute gay community life. I develop a perspective on modern intimacies (Plummer 2003), more specifically on affective solidarity, also explored by feminist and lesbian researchers (J. Dean 1996; Cvetkovich 2003). It exposes a powerful notion of spontaneous fraternity—communitas experiences, in anthropological parlance—among people who express a notion of solidarity and mutual trust without the constraints of earlier acquaintance and regardless of socioeconomic markers dividing them in daily life. This journey among the various gay arenas of mostly dialogical sociability offers a deep entry into gay subjectivity.

I consider that fraternity endeavor a vehicle for specific gay selfhood confirmation beyond a general accommodation with one’s gay/lesbian identity. That deep-felt personal impact distinguishes the groups I present from most other small groups popular in American society. Based on a vast national survey, Wuthnow (1994: 4) concluded that following the tradition of voluntary associations, four out of every ten Americans belong to a small group that meets regularly and provides caring and support for its members. Nearly two-thirds of all small groups have some connection to the quest for spirituality, and the rest are geared to more specific needs, such as helping individuals cope with addictions

I hope my observations might illuminate some essential issues affecting contemporary gay life. Whatever the answers, however, given the direction of globalization, it is to be expected that the phenomena I recorded will find their way to Israel. A cross-cultural study of social activities in Tel Aviv as compared with our observations at the New York Center might suggest whether, and to what extent, this is actually happening. I have already made a tentative assessment of that trend (2003, 2010).

I believe my portrayals and reflections will be of interest to both gay and nongay audiences, offering a wider view of the urban gay experience—with its alternative spaces and novel patterns of sociability—than the more familiar and limited ethnographic exploration of the gay scene of sex and recreation. It extends and elaborates on Bech’s (1997) rendering of the existential conditions and opportunities for sociability emerging in contemporary urban gay life.

A final comment: most of the chapters present my observations in groups that brought together gay men. Naturally, I could not attend all-women/lesbian meetings. But in three chapters, which introduce the association of bisexuals, sexual compulsives, and religious congregations, lesbians are strongly represented among the participants and occupy prominent leadership roles. In order to maintain anonymity, all names and identifying features of the participants mentioned in the book, except for the well-known religious leaders at CBST and MCC, have been changed.

A Personal Note

I assume that some colleagues among my cohort in academia who are familiar with the work in earlier stages of my career have been puzzled by my attraction in the last two decades to gay studies. However, I am not connected in any serious way, professional or social, to the network of queer anthropologists. As I remember, I expressed a lone opposing voice at the meeting of the Anthropology Research Group on Homosexuality (ARGOH) when it was decided to change its name to SOLGA (Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists). I thought the decision might deter other researchers uncomfortable with that personal tribal designation. I have been equally unhappy with other AAA sections and networks that represent minorities and identities of all sorts (Jewish included).

Nevertheless, I did not relinquish my association with that group of researchers (in 2010 renamed again: AQA—Association for Queer Anthropology). A few among its leading figures have favorably reviewed my CBST ethnography and support my positions in other academic venues. However, my work has not entered the official, though unwritten, list of texts of the tribe (usually recipients of the Benedict Prize), and I remain an outsider in that socioacademic ambience of identity politics. So in a similar vein as my query in the above pages what do gay people want? I try to explain, not to excuse or legitimate, what made me depart from the mainstream research venues of my earlier projects and immerse myself in a subject that has become a field strongly associated with the researcher’s own personal identity and political agenda.

As I mentioned earlier, my engagement in the gay field started with the chance invitation to attend a CBST service. As had happened to me before, and to many other anthropologists in their unplanned choice of fieldwork sites, I was hooked, enchanted, by what became a fatal attraction to that group of people who stood against the Jewish establishment and its organs of all shades at that time. I assume I also came gradually to enjoy my own position of a somewhat radical character in the Israeli academic milieu. But mostly, I felt comfortable in the company of American gay men and women of a similar socio-economic-cultural background, with whom I developed warm relationships of a sort I rarely experienced in my ordinary daily life and academic environment. It was that generous openness—the main theme of this book—that continued to appeal to me and made me move on to study other gay venues. At the same time, however, I was not drawn to extend my research among gay people in Israel. Why not? Too close to home? As fellow Israelis—not representing the ethnographic other in the real sense of the term? Was I worried about an intimate involvement among my own people? And last, I started my ethnographic work by conducting research at home. In recent years, however, I have preferred to keep my professional engagements separate from subjects that are inevitably related to my daily life, politics, and obligations as an Israeli citizen.

CHAPTER 1

The Anthropologist in the Field of Sexuality

The study of gay people inevitably involves a consideration of the ethnographer’s engagement with issues of sexuality, the major indicator of his/her subjects’ social identity. Moreover, it calls attention to the observer’s own comportment in this field of behavior. That topic naturally reminds us of the turmoil raised among anthropologists with the discovery of Malinowski’s diaries (1967). His confessions touched on various sensitive issues. Particularly embarrassing seemed the revelation of his sexual frustration during his work among the Trobrianders. Nevertheless, it took another twenty-five years for that issue to arouse more serious interest in professional forums.¹ The discourse of reflexivity in ethnographic texts, which has continuously expanded in recent decades, has finally penetrated the most intimate sphere of the ethnographer’s life during fieldwork: his/her own sexuality.

Since the early 1990s, conference sessions, articles, ethnographies, and edited volumes have removed the veil of secrecy² and the taboo that surrounded the sexual demeanor of anthropologists (e.g., Newton 1993; Wade 1993; Kulick and Willson 1995; Bolton 1995, 1996; Carrier 1995; Lewin and Leap 1996; Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999; Haller 2001; Goode 2002). While gay and lesbian anthropologists seemed to be more aware and open about that dimension in their professional life, heterosexual anthropologists gradually shared revelations similar to those of their homosexual colleagues.

By and large, the ethnographers mentioned above contested the old code that desexualized anthropologists during fieldwork and taught them to hide any sexual involvement with their informants. The reformist ethnographers considered these implanted guidelines seriously wrong, both professionally and ethically. The lone anthropologist, they argued, whether a man or a woman, is a human being also during fieldwork, and as such, not devoid of a sexual drive or of a sexual persona. By abstaining from sex, ethnographers are apparently observed by their informants as strange, if not deficient, people. Consequently, this behavior has shut them out of a major dimension of their subjects’ lives.

Not surprisingly, for many decades anthropologists have studied family and kinship but only rarely dealt with the sexual lives of the people they studied (e.g., Vance 1991; Tuzin 1991; Friedl 1994). The pioneers, Malinowski and Mead, proved to be far less prudent (and prudish) than later generations of anthropologists who left the field of sexual behavior to the monopoly of other academic disciplines and the mercy of therapists. This narrowing of the ethnographer’s domain of competence also legitimized the ethos that taught older and younger practitioners to refrain from any breach of morality engaging them in a sexual alliance with their informants.

Not only were anthropologists careful to refrain from studying sexuality and concerned about any sexual distraction in the field, they were also anxious to keep their distance from activities and groups defined by a stigmatized sexuality. In particular, they avoided any association that might mark them with the stigma of homosexuality. Observations of homoerotic interaction were rarely reported in ethnographic texts since the anthropologist’s reputation was at stake (e.g., Read 1980: 184–85; Shokeid 2003, 1995: 22–27; Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999). Read’s confession is particularly illuminating. In Other Voices (1980: 184), he returned to his New Guinea ethnography of 1955: The gaps in my record of the Gahuku cannot be retrieved now and I advise skepticism in accepting my statement that homosexual practices did not exist…. As a ‘legitimate’ study, homosexuality remained the ‘vice without a name’.

More radical, and still largely controversial, has been the claim by a few maverick anthropologists, both heterosexuals and homosexuals, that having sex with one’s informants is beneficial for fieldwork. Anthropologists who are sexually involved with their informants, they argue, are better integrated into the community they wish to study.

Heterosexual Anthropologists Reveal Sexual Secrets

Peter Wade (1993), Fran Markowitz (1999), and Erich Goode (2002), all heterosexuals, described the path that had led them to have sex with close informants. Wade, who studied black Colombians, had two romantic/sexual affairs during his two fieldwork projects, the first in a small village and the second in Medellin (one of the largest cities in Colombia). He claims that his intimate affairs affected his standing with both men and women: My position in both Unguia and Medellin was consolidated and legitimized by virtue of my relationships with Marcela and Roberta…. As a result, many people saw me as part of the community: the relationship implied some commitment to Colombian, especially black, society (208).

In her study of Soviet immigrants in New York, Markowitz describes an encounter with a male informant to whom she said that her professional ethics inhibited her from having sex with men she interviewed. ‘What?!’ he exclaimed with incredulity ‘Aren’t you a human being?!’ Eventually, as she dropped her celibacy, it brought with it a great deal of advantages that last into the present (168). She claims also that her female informants expected and supported her sexual involvement with Soviet men. Nevertheless, Markowitz ponders her standing within the conventions of the discipline: My biggest problem, however, remained the nagging thought that I was doing something wrong that went against the ethical foundations of the discipline (168).

Goode, who conducted research on the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), recounted a number of sexual liaisons, including one that resulted in the birth of a daughter. Although his research was not a story of great success, he nevertheless assumes that sex between social scientists and their informants cannot be avoided in certain circumstances: "And pretending that