Lesbian drag kings and the feminine embodiment of the masculine

Part of an ongoing ethnography of an imperial sovereign court I am undertaking, this chapter explores the world of the lesbian drag king and the gendered performance she undertakes in this realm. Taking a relational, situational approach to understanding gender, the lesbian drag queen of the court is also examined in terms of how "her" image and actions give gendered meaning and confer import to the lesbian drag king. Note is also made of lesbian court members' often contradictory gendered relationships with the gay men in this setting: gay drag kings and gay drag kings. Although embodying a masculine persona in image and action has enabled some lesbian drag kings to successfully challenge the often sexist actions and reign of the gay men of the court, it has also resulted in some lesbian drag queens being subordinated in the process. Thus, as much as lesbian drag kings subvert existing gender hierarchies they also sometimes recreate them in the pursuit of situational power.     

The interaction of drag queens and gay men in public and private spaces

This study examines the issue of internal segregation within the gay community, focusing on the ways by which the drag queen subculture is distanced from larger mainstream gay society. Through the use of institutional ethnography, symbolic interactionism, and a naturalist approach to sociology, the researchers sought to understand the subjective experience of the drag queen, in particular how drag queens perceive their interactions with mainstream gay society. Data for this study were collected through a series of observations conducted in a variety of spatial contexts and interviews with 18 drag queens. Findings indicate that spatial distance between the drag queens and the mainstream gay men is dependent on both the social context and the level of professionalization of the drag queen. Although drag queens' perceptions of their status in the gay community are also dependent on the latter, discussions of relationship difficulties and the quest for a long-term romantic partner illustrate that discrimination within the gay community is both widespread and complex.     

Wigs, laughter, and subversion: Charles Busch and strategies of drag performance

This paper examines the strategies of drag performer/ playwright Charles Busch. His performance aesthetic is explored and shown to be subversive even though its initial impulse is to entertain. Basing my arguments on the work of Judith Butler, Elin Diamond, and others, I argue that drag queens like Busch can not only entertain but also make audiences question and criticize through drag's power to create a Brechtian alienation effect and historicize the subject. After showing how he can be viewed as a drag queen, I give a brief biography and discuss such contested terms as "camp" and "gay sensibility." I then focus on Busch's staged reading of Ibsen's Hedda Gahler andA Doll's House, both done in one afternoon at Theatre for The New City (6 May 2000). By examining the performance of Busch and his fellow actors, I demonstrate how a contemporary relevancy is achieved by having the roles played by a female impersonator whose acting choices are filtered through a gay sensibility. The ongoing dialectic between spectator and performer creates a historicized moment in performance that underscores the gender dynamics in unexpected and stimulating ways.     

The beauty and the beast: reflections about the socio-historical and subcultural context of drag queens and "Tunten" in Berlin

In this article, I focus on two different faces found in Berlin's gay subculture: the Tunten and the drag queens. Both are commonly seen as "male homosexual transvestites," although many such individuals today prefer to identify themselves somewhere within a diverse transgender spectrum rather than as transvestites. Tunten and drag queens differ in their gender performativity, their self-image and their chosen role models as well as in the niches in which they have been able to establish themselves in German mainstream society. Based on ethnographic data, I argue against the widespread reductionist view that the differences between Tunten and drag queens lie primarily in style, behavior, talent and success. Nor can these differences be easily explained away as a result of subculture globalization. Instead, I show that there is a simultaneous coexistence of both a subculturally established, "traditional" local transgender culture and a more recently adopted and partly imported, new local transgender culture. The coexistence of these two urban transgender cultures also indicates the paradigm shift in German gay and youth cultures of the last decades. Thus, I will emphasize the importance of the socio-historical and subcultural processes in studying transgender cultures in Western societies.     

Transformance: reading the gospel in drag

Despite the large body of scholarship on drag and its performance of misogyny, mimicry, and masculinity, little attention has been paid to the role of musical genres in Black drag performance and its reception. This essay explores drag performances of gospel music and its relationship with the spectator at the Biology Bar, a Black gay drag site in Chicago. By examining the shift from the club "space" to the church "place," this research locates several possibilities for queer gospel performances. Through the introduction of a theory of transformance, this essay highlights the contradictions, complications, and complexities of the relationship between the Black church and the Black gay community.     

Imagined comrades and imaginary protections: identity, community and sexual risk among men who have sex with men in China

This paper describes the recent development of identity and community among gay men in China. It focuses both on the ways emerging forms of gay identity relate to larger ideological and discursive shifts within society, and on the ways these new forms of identity and community affect situated social interaction among gay men themselves. In particular, it addresses the question of how these emerging forms of gay identity and gay community affect the ways gay men in China understand the threat of HIV and make concrete decisions about sexual risk and safety. Among the chief tactics used by gay men in China to forge identity and community involves appropriating and adapting elements from dominant discourses of the Party-State and the mass media. This strategy has opened up spaces within which gay men can claim "cultural citizenship" in a society in which they have been heretofore marginalized. At the same time, this strategy also implicated in the formation of attitudes and social practices that potentially increase the vunerability of Chinese gay men to HIV infection.     

Happy alone? Sad young men in East Asian gay cinema

This essay chooses as its texts three films representing contemporary gay male subjects from each of the "three" China's: HK, Taiwan, and the Mainland. Relocating the homoerotic image of the "sad young man," a trope popular from Hollywood rebellion films of the 1950s and 1960s, to contemporary China, I discuss how this masculine icon has been transformed from one of heroic rebellion to one of existential isolation. Indeed, as the politics of both the outmoded Confucian family and fractured Chinese nationhood intersect, what the sad young (gay) man rebels against is a political fluctuation which is no longer fixed; as the young man's opposition is no longer fixed, so too does he become alienated even from his own rebellious cause.     

The pattern of sexual politics: feminism, homosexuality and pedophilia

Until recently sex and gender issues were thought to be biological or natural rather than political. The feminist movement largely changed perceptions of gender, and the gay and lesbian movements significantly altered conceptions of sex, so that what were once seen as permanent moral standards are now viewed as historical and political constructions. As views of these groups have moved towards social constructionism, perceptions of child sexuality have become more absolutist. Current attitudes towards child sexuality and representations of it resemble historical attitudes towards women and homosexuals. This article argues that there is a two-phase pattern of sexual politics. The first is a battle to prevent the battle, to keep the issue from being seen as political and negotiable. Psychological and moral categories are used to justify ridicule and preclude any discussions of the issue, and standard Constitutional guarantees are seen as irrelevant. The second phase more closely resembles traditional politics as different groups argue over rights and privileges. Feminist and gay/lesbian politics have recently entered the second phase, while pedophilia is in the first.     

"Beautiful publicity": an introduction to queer Asian film

With a few seemingly apolitical exceptions, openly queer cinemas have generally charted two opposing courses-a propagandistic search for bourgeois acceptance or a radical challenge to sexual hegemony. Yet even the most politically challenging of queer films, for example those of Pasolini, are nevertheless distributed and disseminated through the heteronormative and hegemonically capitalist means they philosophically oppose. This essay thus takes as its texts two low-budget gay male Japanese films of the 1980s, which have been made available on international home video, as opposing examples of politicoeconomic allegories enacted within the self-reflexive contexts of queer cinema and gay male political history. Taken together, the two films present an interlocking example of how Asian queer films both engage and refute "Eastern" and "Western" conceptions of homosexuality and sexual politics in general.     

Homecoming: the relevance of radical feminism for gay men

Sexual politics in the gay male world would be enhanced by a serious engagement with radical feminist politics, particularly critiques of pornography and the sex industry. As the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of patriarchy damages homosexual men, such engagement is crucial to the future of a gay movement.     

Gay male adult development: some stage issues of an older cohort

This paper is a qualitative investigation into developmental stage issues, using a sample of older gay males. Twenty Ohio informants were obtained through convenience sampling for unstructured oral interviews. Erik Erikson's developmental stage model serves as representing traditional stage theory. The traditional view portrays life course in heterosexual terms. While the developmental issues addressed across the life course are likely the same or similar, the traditional schedules of these issues are not apt for gays. Gay life paths start at different ages, based on when identity-acceptance begins. Only then can a gay person undertake successful adult development. Findings indicate that as closeted homosexuals, gay men may experience a false development, resulting from living a double-life. With the acceptance of one's homosexuality, developmental regression occurs in an effort to address gay identity issues previously denied or ignored. Many of the developmental issues arise not from being gay, per se, but from discovering how to assimilate being gay into one's life pattern. This paper thus shows an imperfection in traditional stage models.     

Same-Sex Relationships in Yorùbá Culture and Orature

It is widely believed that lesbianism and homosexuality are foreign concepts and colonial imports to Sub-Saharan Africa. This popular view is not unconnected with hegemonic heterosexual orientation of the society. The pitfall of heterosexual orientation, which hinges on politics of sexual representation, is worth an academic investigation. Therefore, this study seeks to close the analytical gap by examining Yorùbá oral literature, which is regarded as the repertoire of their traditional and cultural beliefs and nuances, to unravel the subject of lesbianism and homosexuality from a sociological approach.

Drawing on interviews and oral literature, this article examines the vital ideas of lesbianism and gay culture among the Yorùbá people of southwestern Nigeria. This article argues that the preconceived obscenity of lesbianism and homosexuality among the Yorùbá hinges on the culture of silence within the cultural milieu of the people. The study concludes that the representation of lesbianism and gay in diverse oral literature, as the repertoire of people's experiences and worldview, rubberstamped its presence and practices in the Yorùbá society.     

Community in gay male experience and moral discourse

The three sociological conceptions of community are outlined: the imagined community, community as friendship, and community as local organizations or groups. The extent to which gay men in New York City experience a gay community in each of these ways is investigated by means of in-depth interviews. The type of moral discourse utilized by the gay men interviewed is also discussed. Finally, gay men in New York City are compared to the new Russian Jewish community in Brooklyn as to which is more "postmodern."     

A queer anxiety: assimilation politics and cinematic hedonics in Relax . . . It's Just Sex

This essay explores the commodification of queer identities in independent cinema, offering particular attention to P. J. Castellaneta's 1998 film, Relax . . . It's Just Sex. Like many contemporary queer independent productions, Relax is ensnared in a representational cinematic hedonics, aspiring to sustain a traditional gay and lesbian politics and simultaneously produce pleasure for multiple audiences. While Relax attempts to position itself as a queer film that resists normative conceptions of sexuality, the feature inadvertently appropriates more essentialized understandings of identity closely aligned to liberation rhetoric.     

Japan's progressive sex: male homosexuality, national competition, and the cinema

This essay serves as a broad investigation of the origins of what came to be called the "gay boom" in 1990's Japanese cinema: a culmination of print media, television, and especially films which made the gay male not merely a visible (political) subject but also the site of displaced contestations of gendered (female) desire. The most visible transnational signifier of the "gay boom" was the 1992 film Okoge, a film which, in keeping with a Japanese trend which relocates the gay male as a safe displacement of female desire, posits the heterosexual female as the audience's point of identification in a film about the lives of gay Japanese men. Using this as a starting point, this essay seeks to explore how male homosexuality and gender construction operate within both Japanese nationalism and the transnational discourse of Japanese cinema's dissemination.     

Considerations of family structure and gender composition: the lesbian and gay stepfamily

Lesbian and gay stepfamilies are unique family forms which must be investigated as such. This paper explores the similarities and dissimilarities between heterosexual stepfamilies and lesbian/gay stepfamilies, arguing that similarity of structure is impacted by gender composition. Utilizing face-to-face and telephone interviews with biological and stepparents in 23 lesbian and gay stepfamilies, the results show that while lesbian and gay stepfamilies share some challenges and strengths with heterosexual stepfamilies, they also evidence a unique and flexible adaptation to becoming a family. The paper is aimed at delineating future areas for lesbian and gay stepfamily research.     

Gaydar: visual detection of sexual orientation among gay and straight men

Currently, American gay people believe they have a unique ability to pick each other out in a crowd (often termed "gaydar" ["gay" + "radar"]). This was established through a nationwide Internet-mediated survey (n = 460). To test for the presence of this ability in gay men, the researcher asked self-identified gay and straight male participants to view a series of unfamiliar men on videotape and determine the sexual orientation of each. The higher overall accuracy of gay men demonstrated a trend level difference from their straight cohorts although falling short (primarily due to small sample size) of the p < 0.05 level. A theory for the emergence of this skill (termed "Adaptive Gaydar" by the author) as a unique perceptual ability/coping mechanism uinique among gay people is also presented.