Table Of ContentGay Voluntary Associations
in New York
GAY VOLUNTARY
A SSOCIATIONS
IN NEW YORK
Public Sharing and Private Lives
Moshe Shokeid
UNIV ER SI T Y O F PENNS Y LVANIA PRE S S
PHIL ADEL PHIA
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Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. The Anthropologist in the Field of Sexuality 11
Chapter 2. Concealments and Revelations in Ethnographic Research 29
Chapter 3. The Regretless Seniors 47
Chapter 4. Attending Meetings of Sexual Compulsives Anonymous 63
Chapter 5. In the Company of the Bisexual Circle 89
Chapter 6. The Interracial Gay Men’s Association 114
Chapter 7. The Gentle Men’s Circle 133
Chapter 8. Cuddling with Gay Bears 146
Chapter 9. Listening to the Sermons in Gay Congregations 152
Chapter 10. Talking Sex, Imagining Love 175
Afterword: Negotiating Gay Subjectivity 200
Notes 207
References 213
Index 227
Acknowledgments 231
Introduction
In the early 1980s my family and I lived in Queens, New York, where I stud-
ied 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 defned as “one-
night-stand ethnicity,” but did not form the voluntary associations—ofen
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. Te 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 organi-
zation, it could still continue to meet the needs of its now sizeable congrega-
tion, many of whom were ill with AIDS. Or would it have to hire a full-time
paid rabbi and paid staf, 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 feld 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 Tir-
teenth Street), the Center hosts a wide variety of organizations and activi-
ties. 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. Te 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
2 Introduction
more. Te 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 Fair-
ies, sexual compulsives, men attracted across race, Leathermen, Bears, Gay
Fathers, men engaging in nonsexual physical afection (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 commu-
nity beyond the Center to churches active in the city, ofshoots 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 aforded the oppor-
tunity to observe a wide section of the gay community across ethnic, cul-
tural, 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 ofen been deemed a unique char-
acteristic 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. Te frst, much afected in later years by the AIDS
epidemic, is the study of sites and institutions that ofer 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). Te other is the study of specifc 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; Boelstorf 2007; Valen-
tine 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
Introduction 3
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 sin-
gle-site community studies, ultimately resulted in full-fedged ethnographies
on both. In contrast, some of my observations at the Center have been pub-
lished thus far only as separate articles introducing specifc organizations.
Te present volume incorporates that work, adapted to the leading motif of
my account along with additional material introducing my long-term obser-
vations 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 communi-
cate with some of my close “informants” and friends who are presented in the
following pages through phone conversations, e-mail exchanges, and meet-
ings 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). Tese two chapters transcend the individual groups reported
on but nevertheless deal with matters given voice in their meetings. Tey
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 his-
tory, theory, and method of my work (my engagement in the research of sex-
uality in particular), and end with concluding remarks ofering 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 classifed 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 feldwork 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 expe-
rienced across the world, while they play with the free-foating signifers
of texts” (1996: 137–38). A similar argument has been recently made by
