Is homosexuality an occurence in natural indigenous tribes (both the few current ones and those who were) that haven't and hadn't been touched by "our" modern "advanced" soceity?

by Solid_SHALASHASKA
radios_appear

I'm not exactly sure I understand the scope of the question. How modern and advanced are we talking here?

Do Ancient Greece and Ancient India count? Are you looking for purely nomadic cultures? Locationally consistent hunter-gatherer tribes? What's the date cut-off? The Industrial Revolution? Agriculture at all?

woodwalker700

I would suggest asking this question over at /r/AskAnthropology, it probably falls more under their purview, especially since you're technically asking about the present.

I couldn't find anything exactly like what you're asking, but here's a vaugely similar topic, about homosexuality in antiquity: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/9g6vqn/what_evidence_of_homosexuality_is_there_in_early/

MarshmallowPepys

This is a tough question to answer because of the debatable meaning of words like "homosexuality," "natural," "indigenous," "tribes," "touched," "our," etc. Historians are a persnickety bunch, and I'm going to be persnickety by stipulating that I'm focusing here on Central and South American cultures around the time of first contact with the Iberians. However, the simple answer to the spirit of your question is "Frequently, yes, in indigenous American societies, there was often some degree of same-sex activity. But historians argue about the meaning of this same-sex activity."

Pete Sigal's edited volume Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America can serve as an indication of the types of scholarly argument that surround your question. This book contains chapters by a variety of historians of indigenous American cultures and their changes in the wake of Iberian contact. These historians pull evidence from their particular areas of expertise, from the Aztecs to the Zunis, to support their interpretations of three main debates about historical "homosexuality." Let's look at each of these themes.

  1. Identity. The point here is that sexual behavior does not necessarily equal sexual identity, as it often does today. Say we know a high-status Maya man had sex with a low-status Maya man in the year 1511. Does that mean that we know that those two Maya men were homosexual? Not necessarily. Maybe these two Maya men loved and/or fucked only men, and maybe they felt that this was something fundamental about their identities. But maybe in early 16th century Maya culture, sexual practice has no relationship to identity. Maybe it was totally plausible for Maya guys to have sex and then say "No homo." We just don't know. As the examples in Infamous Desire show, same-sex behaviors were widespread across American cultures previous to their contact with Europeans. But the contributors to the volume argue with each other about the relationship of behavior to meaning.
  2. Desire. This gets at the issue of the motivation behind historical figures' actions: what desire/impulse/choice led a historical figure to do something? Our "modern" culture tells us that sexual desire is the primary or most valid reason for having sex. But there are a range of other motivations--other types of desire--that might encourage someone to have sex. One might desire heirs, desire power over another person, desire wealth, desire to fill a ritual role, or desire to transgress social norms. The (largely Spanish-language) written sources we have from the Americas in the late 15th and 16th centuries frequently ignore this question of desire, so the historians in Sigal's book are left to their competing interpretations of what might motivate two Inca women to have sex. Was it sexual desire as we understand it today, or something else?
  3. Gender and power. What gender is culturally associated with power and dominance, and how does this affect motivations for sex? In "'our' modern 'advanced' society," as you put it, masculinity is typically associated with leadership, activeness, and dominance, while femininity is more typically associated with obedience, passivity, and supportiveness. (Of course, there are intentional movements which aim to push back at these gender/power associations.) In Sigal, Richard C. Trexler argues that the indigenous American cultures which the Spaniards encountered had similar associations of masculinity and power, femininity and weakness. Trexler further claims that these gendered power meanings affected same- and different-gender interactions. For example, Trexler asserts that across the Americas it was a common practice for male prisoners of war to be forced to wear women's clothes. Trexler interprets this "forced transvestism" as an essentially gendered power move: if women are weak, and captured prisoners are weak, then captured prisoners should dress like women. Trexler extends this syllogism to include sexual intercourse, saying that a man sexually penetrating another man held a meaning inherently tied to gender and power in pre-Columbian America. Michael J. Horswell disagrees, and focuses on Inca examples of gender complementarity rather than inequality. Horswell proposes that the relative equality of Inca men and women meant that a third, disempowered gender was necessary to express masculine dominance, and so dominant men would express their power through sex with third gender people.

What all the historians in Sigal agree on is that, yes, in the American cultures that Spanish and Portuguese explorers encountered in the 15th and 16th centuries, there was some degree of same-sex contact among indigenous people. We're still not sure, though, if that means that there was a pre-Columbian analogue to modern queerness.

victoryfanfare

The easy answer: If applying a modern, normative definition of homosexuality to indigenous peoples, yes.

For example, many First Nation (North American) tribes recognize people called “two-spirit”, who despite being of one biological sex take up the roles of the other or both, including sexual partners and spouses, societal roles like hunting, dress, etc. Two-spirited people are not exactly an identity or a sexuality, but rather a ceremonial or spiritual role that varies from tribe to tribe. These two-spirit people were accepted harmoniously within their tribes until European settlers’ sexual ideologies were imposed upon the First Nations, and now are in a position of struggle as they attempt to reclaim their heritage (and societal legitimacy) but also tangle with the devastation wrought upon the hundreds of FN cultures. Colonizing forces often target perceived deviance as it is an unfortunately efficient way of stamping out indigenous culture.

As such, same-sex relationships and intercourse was (and is) completely normal and natural. Many people of FN heritage today consider themselves two-spirit and they are no less modern or advanced as the rest of us. However, much of the world is currently arranged into heteronormative society, in which cultural practices and institutions privilege heterosexuality and associated relationships and genders roles as "natural", when the truth is much more ambiguous: sexuality comes in many forms, even beyond homosexual and heterosexual, and it has always existed and always will.

The more difficult answer: certainly, but also not exactly.

This is because the history of sex is like asking about the history of eating. Everyone has sex, just as everyone eats, but pinning down the way it is performed in society is about reconstructing context. Unfortunately we have trouble reconstructing context for a lot of indigenous societies because difference has often been eradicated by colonizing and/or invading forces, so instead we'll look more generally.

Here are some things to think about societies compared to "ours", whether they be indigenous, ancient or modern:

  • does this society have a binary gender system wherein one can be in alike or not alike relationships?
  • does this society link sexuality with identity/community?
  • does this society conflate sexual attraction with gender roles?
  • does this society have values that would discourage non-reproductive couplings, or a hierarchy of ideal types of relationships?
  • does this society have clear lines between platonic, romantic and sexual love?
  • does this society consider certain forms of sexuality deviant, and if so, is it a moral failing?
  • does this society have gender roles that can be deviated from, i.e. a man behaving effeminately?

Even spanning back through time in Europe, we can see things differ from today. Oftentimes historical "homosexuality" was not exclusively about the divide between gender, i.e. a man sleeping with a man: it was between active and passive participants, who penetrates and who is penetrated. Both men could occupy very different social positions and perspectives based on participation; the man who was penetrated might be malthakos, or soft, but the man who does the penetrating wouldn't get the same designation. Either way, neither man would identify as a homosexual because our concept of homosexuality is wound up in our society's trappings (gender roles, societal roles, reproduction, religious norms, etc) and those things just wouldn't be true for them.

To continue in that vein, a womanizing man in Ancient Greece might be considered effeminate because he prefers the company of women and spends a lot of time trying to make himself appealing to women, the same way a man who likes to have anal sex with other men might be considered effeminate because he is penetrated (rather than penetrates) and thus is unmasculine. I think the man who enjoys anal sex might have far more in common than his womanizing contemporary than he would with a modern gay man living in Greece in 2018, and that is almost entirely because there's a different value on gender norms versus sexual identity. But there is also something to be said about love and sex being part of a natural human experience, too; the same way we can read love poems written from thousands of years ago and relate to them, I'm also very certain that the ancient man and the modern man might both find common ground in discussing how they experience their attraction to other men –– their lives and personal identities will just be vastly different regardless, living in societies that limit and control their expression, attraction, etc in wildly different ways.

David Halperin's "How To Do The History of Male Homosexuality" and "Is There A History of Sexuality?" are excellent sources on this dilemma; he argues that that there is no such thing as a history of [male] homosexuality, and I am inclined to agree, because you can't apply our definition of homosexuality to a society that does not adhere to a sex binary system (male and female), does not adhere to a gender binary system (man and woman), doesn't have the same metric for what sort of gender deviance falls under the umbrella of sexuality or not (i.e. is crossdressing related to sexuality?), and doesn't perceive sexuality to be a more relevant social factor than any other category.

But, obviously, people with similar genitals have been known to get it on since the dawn of time, so it's still sort of a yes.