Male homosexuality in modern Japan: cultural myths and social realities

By Mark J. McLellandd

Excerpts from page 3

Throughout the book I have had to resist the temptation to oppose the relatively fluid understandings of sexuality held by many of my Japanese interviewees with a monolithic 'gay identity' supposedly held by western homosexual men and women. ...

Yet, although it was clear by the mid-1980s that, as Gayle Rubin famously pointed out 'in modern, western, industrial societies, homosexuality has acquired much of the institutional structure of the ethnic group' (1998: 112), empirical studies of so-called 'gay communities' have failed to give coherent content to the notion of a 'gay' or 'homosexual' identity. In fact, studies of homosexuality and AIDS transmission such as those carried out by Dowsett (1966) in Australia and Coxon (1996) in Britain question the usefulness of identity labels such as 'gay' altogether and instead speak of 'men who have sex with men.' In their extensive interciews with partners in 'non-heterosexual relationships' Heaphy et al. (1998) also found that the terms 'lesbian,' 'gay,' and 'bisexual' were often resisted by their interviewees and that the understandings of these terms sometimes different between interviewee and interviewer. They also discovered that the different partners in a relationship also sometimes differed in their acceptance of labels. That these differences in interpretation can to a large extent, a common culture, should draw attention to the problems which arise when 'sexuality' is analysed across cultures.

Although the 'ethnic' self-characterization of lesbians gand gays in the US may have made sense given that society's long history of civil rights struggles and widespread legal restrictions on the expression of same-sex sexuality there is no reason to assume that this particular formulation will endure. As Altman states, 'the idea of "gay/lesbian" as a sociological category is only about one hundred years old, and its survival even in Western developed countries cannot be taken for granted' (1996: 79) (see also Altman et al. 1988). As Neil Miller (1993) comments in his journalistic account of 'gay life' around the world 'the terms "gay" and "straight" revealed themselves to be Western cultural concepts that confused more than they elucidated' (1993: 68-9). It is therefore ironic that some Japanese gay-rights activists look to western models, the efficacy of which are already disputed in some western societies. The role of these imported models in Japan is unclear: 'America' serves as a sign of liberation for many Japanese homoesxual men whilst simultaneously being rejected by others. It is misleading, then, to set up 'gay identity' as something that the west has developed which Japan somehow lacks, despite the fact that some Japanese homosexual men, gay rights activists in particular, do present this argument.