As I accumulate and work through materials about Alvina Krause, the legendary acting professor at Northwestern University, I keep running into aspects of sexuality, first that AK was in a “Boston Marriage” with a woman and second the premise that homosexuality has covertly dominated the School of Speech, now re-named “Communication Arts” which includes everything from stage theatre to hearing problems. The actual “communication” courses are heavy on social theory, including that of sexuality. This is evidently what evolved out of my dear old “language and thought” programs, though discussion skills seem to have been quashed. There’s a new exciting program in Qatar where it appears one can study modern media while wearing a burkha.
By these roundabout means, I discovered that J. Michael Bailey, a sex-role professor (Gender-Bending and Transsexualism) had an office in Swift Hall, which for a while I thought was the same as Annie May Swift Hall which is the theatre building or was when I was there. AK’s office was upstairs. I supposed that Bailey, who’s a bit notorious, had been given a hideaway there, but it turns out that was fantasy, alas. There WERE a few queens in that building, some female and playing a role, some female and NOT playing a role; some male, one way or another. AK was either an empress or a witch, depending on how your life turned out.
Bailey’s controversial, readable, and absorbing book is called “The Man Who Would Be Queen.” I suspect he didn’t choose the title. The text is about “feminine” little boys (pretty, slight, and fond of dressing like princesses) and whether they grow up to be gay (yes and no), but also about men who want to be women, maybe because they are gay or even if they are not. This book is ten years old and things move rapidly in such a “hot” (sorry) field but the contents of this book remain useful and thoughtful -- a good place to start.
Bailey asserts that the evidence shows in every culture between one and three per cent of men are “gay.” He identifies set-aside communities of she-males (men being women either by cross-dressing, role, or possibly surgery) in many cultures, even those that have none of the modern ability to actually change the gender of a person. He distinguishes between men who desire men and want to become female in order to fulfill that desire, and men who desire men but fulfill that by being tough, honed, “leather” men. He does not discuss “bears,” hairy working class or bearded intellectual guys with tummies.
Some time is spent trying to understand why same-sex desire would persist in the context of evolution since theoretically they don’t have children. I think about evolution (even more than sex), so I have some ideas not represented in this book. One idea is that gay guys contribute artistically and as uncles to the quality of life of the whole. Bailey doesn’t consider them as extra warriors or as part of the support system of warriors in a context without women. (Young men taken along for sex and as servants.) There is an evolutionary justification of female menopause that holds up the value of grandmothers as contributing to the life of the tribe and therefore the survival of the children, as well as being carriers of culture which tends to help survival. Maybe gay uncles are parallel. In some tribes, uncles are more important than fathers in the lives of the children.
Genetic considerations seem so far inadequate to Bailey, but the book was written before the discovery of the epigenome, which does not remove genes nor mutate them, but can modify them, using a process called methylation that can persist over several generations. This would help to explain identical twins in which one is gay and one is not -- in spite of identical genes. One may have acquired a epigene that the other did not. Bailey does recognize that biological processes after the ovum splits do not necessarily affect both fetuses. Also a force like extra testosterone or adrenaline in the mother’s blood will have a different effect if it’s early in the pregnancy than it does later. He does not seem to be aware that whatever causes homosexuality on a biological level, it exists in most animals at rates not so different from humans, even though some of the animals are domestic and culled if non-breeding.
Evolution in birds is a vivid demonstration that mutations can persist even if mildly detrimental so long as they don’t actually get in the way of survival. What Bailey has not looked at here are gender-related characteristics that tend to affect survival of babies in a NEGATIVE way. He does talk about male violence entwined with sexual jealousy, which is expressed in lions by the male killing all cubs with different fathers. We are accustomed to newspaper stories about jealous and violent men beating women to the point of causing miscarriage even of the man's own babies.
I’ve been following the Good Man Project on Twitter where we are hearing about fathers who deliberately arouse their small sons with rough-housing at bedtime, follow it up in the night with actual forced intercourse, and then displace their guilt onto the child with horrendous beatings. Such aggressive and potent men are likely to be successful and sexy enough to attract women, maybe women who want the man enough to neglect the ensuing children. He might be a good battle leader, an alpha guy. Marrying a gay man, who tends not to be jealous or violent and who seeks other men for extramarital sex rather than a girl-like boy, seems like a good option for survival of the child. The consequences for boys in either situation are only beginning to be explored and expressed.
A nurturing man who loves babies and protects children in the way we think a mother ought to, would be the most likely of all to produce surviving children unless he is so distracted that he doesn’t earn a living. I think of Walt Whitman. This nurturing quality is partly what I respond to in “bears,” alongside intelligence. Think of Professor Bhaer in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Men.” I’ve heard the character mocked by people who think a woman who loves such a man is afraid of “real” men. Indeed! See the previous paragraph, which is the way many women picture ideal men.
Bailey spends little time on women so he’s not helpful in thinking about AK or myself. I think we are not un-alike though not lesbian in the way most contemporaries seem to think of it -- that is, either bull-dykes or boy-sexy. But for us I think the factors most important are impatience with nonsense and the demand to be self-determining. I do have a taste for cross-dressing, which caused me to spend time musing in front of the display cases at a high-end men’s clothing store when I walked my dog past late at night: beautifully tailored tweed suits with suede detailing and antler buttons, cashmere scarves in muted colors, soft fedoras with wide brims. But I would have to be slim and flat-chested to wear such clothes. (Katharine Hepburn, Coco Chanel, neither lesbian.) If I’d really cared, I could have whittled and dieted myself to that shape, but I didn’t really care that much and didn’t believe that it would attract people I would desire. Anyway I’m busy thinking. Walk on.
So much of gender thinking is about confrontation, striving against each other. And then these men on Twitter claim they yearn for intimacy, real sharing -- even fusion. But that’s nurturing stuff and to many people nurturing equals neuter. Still -- back in the old days of the School of Speech we were inclined to nurture each other, gay or not. Some of us have successfully raised some exceptional kids. My prime example that you might recognize is Paula Prentiss and Dick Benjamin, still madly in love after all these years, still a little wacky.
Ross and Prentiss, the offspring. Who needs royalty?
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