Over time I've been obsessed by how different the world looks to different groups, how they got that way, and why I'm myself. Some of this comes from WWII when we were facing adversaries just like ourselves (the US is still as much German as English, if not more) and as different as possible (Japan). Most of this came out in fiction writing. In the seventh grade I wrote a little playlet for my class to perform. Melva Edwards was supposed to be a daughter of a Japanese family who danced to entertain visitors. I didn't really know how or whether that was done and neither did Melva, but I told her, "Just pretend."
That's the actor's way of understanding other people: get inside them and pretend. Or maybe it's more accurate to say get them inside you and feel. Anyway, it will drive you nuts to do that with everyone and some will make you sick. (Imagine Gannon inhabiting you!) So I've followed a few groups designated by society, at first thinking of them as grist for the fiction mill, but gradually becoming more and more absorbed by what makes them a group, how individuals solve the relationship with the group as well as the larger society, and what they can say to the larger society.
The groups, as I've said before, include Blackfeet, Unitarian Universalists, animal control, the cusp of agriculture becoming industrial revolution and then globalizing. Groups I watch are my cohorts in the theatre at NU as the Fifties became Sixties, homesteaders on the prairies, in the Willamette Valley, and in 19th century Michigan esp along rivers and at the Dunes. The choices just happened. I didn't plan them. One of them that I don't talk about much is boys who do sexwork for survival.
One of the first things I learned was that the groups were sometimes organically formed, like my own family enchained by genes and searching for economic safety. One of the second things I learned was not to believe what the larger society assigned them, sometimes by scholarship from academic anthropologists. Third, it is not necessarily the reality (whatever that is -- mostly ecology and politics) that controls lives as much as fantasy does.
One of the most powerful dynamics is the notion that those anthros who showed up in fair weather went back home to write books made a lot of money -- because they captured precious hidden material from the local indigenous people. In fact, the anthros were often blind to how much had been imposed by overriding culture. They never made much money from books. Books only sell because they fulfill expectations, so "The Education of Little Tree" written by a man full of Nazi sentiments, is still in print. Many more authentic works are gone. It isn't the writing -- it's the business of publishing which responds to readers rather than writers, and then imposes the expectations of readers on the writers. But the webworks of system connections, chits to be called in, powerful relatives, and access to venture capital is also effective. We don't know what the internet will do to all this.
Another mercilessly romanticized group -- at the same time as being stigmatized -- is boys who do sexwork. The best way to understand them is to discount the sex part of it altogether. No matter the appetite for backdoor sex -- far more widespread than we thought -- larger forces like the disintegration of families, the phobias about homosexuality, economic shifts that remove jobs for young people, and the disintegration of cities leaving an ecology of ruined warehouses, rail lines, and manufacturing plants standing open over ruined machines. Empty houses, barely habitable, make niches for interstitial humans as well as raccoons, opossums, and dog packs. Our culture generates enough garbage to feed the sidewalk people.
The SW's form a gamut from bony starving little boys on the street to near rock-stars, sought out and demanding big fees so they live well and stay attractive. The intrusion of violence is a reflection of the larger culture which values the ability to inflict violence and likes to think about it in a double-toxic porn that the larger culture enjoys in fiction and non-reader's videos.
Boys grow up. Older boys are more able to cope and may move into less arduous ways to make money or they might be hooked on drugs used to numb sex and violence or without medical care they might just die. But they will be different from mainstream people. Even cleaned up, taught manners and speaking nicely, dressing well, and the rest of the facade we count on to evaluate people, their inner structure will be different.
Culture and communal identity are taught during menarche, an understudied time when the human body is affected by the adrenal glands beginning to add sexual impulses. Usually the age is 9 to 12. This is the age span favored by many predators because the boy is responsive but controllable. But there is something else happening, which is the growing brain. The system loops that experience teaches the brain, the gut, and the heart are forming. One key connection, the myelinated third vagus nerve, forms a kind of presentation screen of the face and upper chest (heart and lungs) that makes the person's thought visible. Until the child learns a poker face, an observant person can see their emotional life as it happens. This can be key to attracting sex customers and pleasing them. We call it empathy.
Alongside being apparent to others, the child learns to read another person's emotions. Some were raised in families with violent alcoholic parents so that they became supersensitive to the approach of attack and skillful at turning them aside with distractions or placating. This makes them challenging candidates for "therapy" in which some supposedly healthy person tries to form a bond and use it to change behavior in people who have learned to be covert and suspicious. But it also suits them for their work.
Often these young people hate themselves, internalizing stigma, and have no awareness that their own growth might make everything different. But they crave intimacy as an endorsement and if they are attached, they are obsessively intense about it. Yet, they've been rejected and betrayed so much that they move on because "that's the way the world is." This is not so different from the main culture.
What surprised me and justified my interest was their persistent questions about religion and morality. The old tropes didn't work -- what other forms are there? I tried to answer that question. It's not sugar-coated. It is powered by the fabulous discoveries by science. Sometimes I'm awed by what I can only call the boys' noble courage. But they need to stay secret to avoid status quo stigma meant to control them, maybe eliminate them.
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