Abstract
Moshe Shokeid’s Gay Voluntary Associations in New York: Public Sharing and Private Lives is an interesting book that not only provides a portrait of how (mostly) gay men in the 1990s in New York interacted in voluntary associations but also provides a thought-provoking reflection on identity, sexuality, and concealment in ethnographic work.
The book relies on Shokeid’s ethnographic research through the 1990s, giving accounts of the various groups he visited and participated in at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center (“the Center”) in the West Village of Manhattan with the addition ofsome material about the Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (a gay and lesbian synagogue also in the West Village). He opens with a discussion of a Center group called SAGE—Senior Action in a Gay Environment—writing about various men he met and the stories they told about their lives in the group, illustrating how it operated as “more than an ordinary rap group” (p. 59). He explains how older gay men came together to talk not about the challenges of aging for gay men, but more about their everyday challenges, especially the “search for Mr.Right” (p. 60).
For Shokeid it was “deeply” moving to experience such “unrestrained openness among strangers” and the discussion of “emotional and sexual cravings,” for it was an experience he had not had in his “mainstream Israeli environment” (p. 62). For me, an American lesbian, it read like a story of people I might know. His later chapters told similar stories of other groups and also were written so that readers could feel like they knew the group. In that sense, these chapters represent the greatest strength of the book—they read like a good ethnography that lets the reader travel a bit into the world of others, to experience it and come to know it.
Shokeid included one chapter of ethnographic observations that read differently than the rest. In Chapter Nine, he presents an ethnographic account of sermons at the Congregation Beth Simchat Torah and other gay and lesbian congregations (Dignity, Unity, and Metropolitan Community Church), where he participated as a “butterfly observer” (visiting numerous denominational services, often on the same day, in essence flitting from one to the next) (p. 153). Shokeid chose to focus the chapter on a discussion of the text of sermons (“ritual and religious texts”) and their social role, following a trend of analyzing religious texts as an art form in ethnography (p. 171).
Even though he notes how these congregations are different from other groups in the book (primarily because they included a more diverse gay and lesbian community), I feel his presentation of their stories (reflecting a different means of analysis) perhaps exaggerated the differences. These accounts were less intimate and read less like a visit to a particular group. As a reader, I felt like I too had been a “butterfly observer” of these congregations, and analytically I felt slightly at a loss for how to think about their relationship to the analysis of the groups he presented in earlier chapters. (Shokeid’s afterword clarifies the significance of this chapter by explaining how the messages in these texts were primarily about love, reflecting how the congregations also essentially operated as groups stressing affectionate bonds.)
In his final full chapter, he discusses the life stories of two men that he names as some of his “closest friends,” presenting them as “full research personas” in order to illustrate “the meaning of anonymous sex from ‘the native’s point of view’” (pp. 176–177). He argues, using ideas from anthropological understandings of emotion, that anonymous sex for many of the men in his study was a search for “emotional and social bonding, a mode of sexual motivation far closer to the code of mainstream society” (p. 176). Yet he also traces how many felt a core element of gay culture, at the time, was a belief that “sex and feelings would remain separate domains” (p. 197). The point Shokeid comes to in the end is that the search for “Mr. Right” noted in many earlier chapters indicated that many of these gay men were interested in “sex with affectionate intimacy,” but nevertheless they remained loyal to the ethos of anonymous sex in gay culture. The way in which many of the social groups that Shokeid describes functioned as places to express “unconditional affection” (p. 205) (not as cruising places for anonymous sex) highlights what Shokeid came to understand—that these groups were a place to deliberate, and enact, these various components of gay culture and subjectivity.
Shokeid ends with an Afterword where he takes up topics that could have been more central to his entire discussion. First, he finally, very clearly, names himself as an “alien anthropologist” (p. 200). While he may have used this term to highlight his position as an Israeli, the tone in this section of the book read to me also as a commentary written from his position as a (mostly) not-gay person observing those who are gay. I say this with some trepidation because, as a reader, I’m not really sure how Shokeid identifies and am somewhat relying on the book jacket, which stated he was “neither gay, nor American born.” As a reader, throughout most of the book, I felt like he skirted the issue of his own relationship to the community, sometimes stating that he adopted “an outsider’s perspective” (p. 5) and at other times stating that this was research that “has become” close to his “own personal identity and political agenda” (p. 9).
In Chapter Two, in particular, he spends a good deal of time discussing the study of sexuality (and ethics of different researcher positions) in anthropology and states how he has come to realize it is important to report the “hesitations, decisions, moral dilemmas and mistakes” of his research, how his “true sexual identity” should be written about in terms of a “gradual discovery,” and how he did at one point in his research join in a “sexual activity with a (male) roommate” (p. 25). My sense is that he is trying to tell his readers that his sexual identity is complicated and was challenged by his interaction and participation with those he came to know in his research, but the way he wrote about it seemed to me to tease the reader rather than clarify his (possibly complicated) position as ethnographer. It is certainly legit to choose not to publicly discuss one’s own identity, but I feel his discussion of his role tried to straddle many ways in which a researcher can do so (or not) such that it left it hard to untangle his position in relation to the analysis.
The second important comment in the afterword that could have been more central is his discussion of the way people in his study publicly revealed their most intimate feelings and desires to strangers (p. 200) and how that left him, in his words, astonished and overwhelmed. He explains it as likely related to his position as an Israeli observing American behavior, and he explains how these types of organizations, and certainly these types of interactions, are not present in Israeli society. I found this discussion quite interesting because it gave me a real sense both of how he was understanding so many of his interactions and also of how he interpreted these groups as particular to American gay culture.
On a related note, it is here, in his afterword, that he finally discusses his research in relation to Wuthnow’s on voluntary associations. Shokeid suggests that the groups he studied were not primarily religiously affiliated and instead operated much more as “affective fellowships” where they were able to “generate solidarity” by expressing “basic dimensions of an (American) gay subjectivity” (p. 206). This observation, to me, was central to his analysis and helped bring together all the chapters about the different groups he visited, even those of which he only did “butterfly observations.”
In the end, Shokeid offers an interesting portrait of (mostly) gay men’s groups in New York City in the 1990s as “affective fellowships” that build relations on emotional attachment but still honor some gay cultural values about sex. Yet, because Shokeid isn’t entirely clear on his position and often references mainstream anthropological understandings (and not much LGBTQ anthropology) to explain the lives of these gay men, the book also reads as an attempt to explain these gay lives from the perspective (as he puts it) of the “‘classical’ role of the anthropologist who sailed to a site away from home to study ‘another culture’” (p. 8).