This special access to the Other’s private sphere, to shelter from prying eyes had a price, one which the travellers could actually afford: as such, this privatized exploration of homosexuality cannot be divorced from questions of privilege and the hierarchies that separate travelers from the indigenous. Courtyards, casbahs, labyrinthine markets, somber hamams… all of these became fodder for homo-eroticism, sexual experimentation, and later, even pornography and gay charter flights to North Africa. It sheltered (moneyed) travellers and provided their homosexualities in formation inward space to blossom. Though the North Africa they saw still outwardly adhered to moral conservatism, this conservatism was “paradoxically” protective for them because it allowed for discretion. Traveling French writers like André Gide, and later, homosexual “nomads” fleeing oppressive European societies, had expressed admiration for North Africans’ investment in the private sphere, their live-and-let live attitudes: these travelers had even found comfort and protection in those values themselves. Immigrants (and earlier Algerian French Arabs) had very different relationships to two important binaries that some say structure all of modern life: the public-private distinction and the homo-hetero binary. This alternative history starts, in my version, with the colonial encounter in North Africa, then moves to the era of the immigration from North Africa to Europe, and finally takes a twist with the advent of the internet and cellphones. I will also use fiction and other cultural representations to get at the heart of our understandings of sexuality, which is not meant to substitute for the study of human subjects. What ethical issues arise when discussing that which aims to remain secret? Does one endanger underground sexual subcultures by exposing them to analysis and scrutiny? For these reasons, some of what follows will be speculative, theoretical, anonymized… absent names, places, and identifications.
However, this misidentifies a historical continuum: an important number of gay youth of color are choosing clandestinity for reasons that have less to do with past oppression, than with contemporary desires for cultural affirmation and feelings of exclusion in white gay spaces.īefore I detail this alternative history, some admissions are in order: clandestinity is a notoriously difficult object of study, and sexual clandestinity even more so. Pioneering activists may legitimately conclude, when faced with young gay men who choose clandestinity while outness is available, that these youth are ungratefully spitting at the struggle. For most of their recent history, gay people in Europe and North America did not choose their clandestinity society’s homophobia pushed them indoors whether they liked it or not.
One must acknowledge that offering an alternative and perhaps charitable view of clandestinity has the potential to offend. However, I argue that these subcultures are of the utmost currency because they force us to reconsider core imperatives of transparency and visibility that LGBT communities have historically embraced as “progressive.” Drawings by Neila Czermak Ichti The particular subcultures I will describe here seem at first glance to look backward, valuing that which has been discarded in the canonical history of gay liberation: the secret, the invisible, the silent. Much of the research in my book Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017), alters this historical script by weaving in the voices of queers of color and immigrants: I identify clandestinity and interiors as productive sites for the emergence of queer ethnic minority subcultures. Gay self-expression that occurred privately in clandestine clubs, bars, and undergrounds - no matter how emphatic and celebratory - was always going to be mere pre-history, compared to the telos of “coming out” and public acceptance. Acquiring the liberty to express one’s sexual identity in public was generally the desired end goal for 20th century gay activism. When writing the recent history of gay liberation in the “Western” world, we have tended to hold interiors in inferior esteem, as compared with exteriors.
0 kommentar(er)
