a few months later, Jeff suggested I join him at the next GSA monthly meeting. For a long time, he told me, he had hesitated to invite me, mostly because of the embarrassment of having me watch him during a sexual activity. But eventually, he concluded that at most, he would not enjoy for once the complete freedom to “do his thing.” He considered this a minor sacrifice.
It was now my turn to hesitate and consider my forthcoming voyeuristic role in a notorious sexual activity. I decided to go along, and to my great relief, I soon discovered my presence was not as embarrassing as I had thought it would be. I was not obliged to strip but remained in jeans. Nor was I obliged to participate in the ongoing activities. Benefiting from the introduction by Jeff, I could stroll around and talk to friendly members. Also, contrary to my worry, the place did not smell of urine.6 Most important, I did not feel I was violating the privacy of the participants. I came as Jeff’s friend. Jeff could rely on my code of confidentiality and feel assured that my observations, if ever published, would not harm his friends.
My visit to the Golden Shower event seemed to cement our friendship. As we all exited, relieved that all had gone well, Jeff told me that when the lights went out for a few seconds, he thought it was a police raid and was worried about my being caught in an embarrassing situation. He then told me another reason that had initially made him unwilling to take me along to the event: he did not wish to feel like an “organism under a microscope.” But since then he had read my CBST book and had no worries about my way of portraying the people I observed. He liked his own presentation in my narrative, although his identity remained disguised to anyone else.
As for my mood about this event and my evaluation of my own behavior as “participant observer,” I felt that I had undergone one of the most daring experiences in my career. Not because I witnessed a Bruegel picture—a chaotic, fantastic, and in some way forbidden scene—but because I did not shy away from a social setting, one that prior to my participation seemed somewhat obscene and threatening to my reputation.
I again experienced the difficult choices that confront the observer in this field when I was encouraged to join a group of men for the annual Bear Pride Convention in Chicago. This time I was fully aware that once I decided to participate it would be far more difficult to retreat into the “don’t touch me” position. I assumed that being away from my home territory might make it more difficult to leave the scene before I got entangled in an embarrassing situation. I felt the same hesitations that had beset me when Jeff invited me to attend the Golden Shower event. Yet I thought that not participating would be cowardly on my part and another lost research opportunity. I had avoided attending all previous annual and regional conventions and weekend retreats that were advertised by the groups I studied. I knew these were opportunities for more intense social activities and for the experience of communitas that nourished these groups for a long time afterward; nevertheless, I worried about the implications of that intensified engagement with my subjects.
The Bear Pride convention took place at a major Chicago hotel. While there, I was supposed to share a room with three other occupants. I decided to go along and let myself be immersed in the event with no preconditions. I was only slightly acquainted with a few of the participants, who were vaguely aware of my professional interests (see Chapter 8).
It was a lively event, with many activities in the hotel (receptions, lectures parties) and in other locations (the major bars in town in particular). An estimated 1,400 men attended the convention. The participants were constantly meeting old buddies and making new friends. My roommates expressed much mutual affection with each other and showed no inhibition about sex play with either old or new acquaintances or in the presence of others. I let go once and joined a sexual activity with a roommate. I was shocked at first at my own loss of “guard” and its possible implications for my research position, reputation, and self-perception. Had I, at last, “gone native”? But I soon dismissed that notion of guilt and adopted instead a sort of fatalistic approach to these “bourgeois-mainstream” conventions and worries. Was it my “advanced age” that made me develop a more opportunistic approach? I will save the reader my own self-analysis and other defenses. But more important for the subject of my presentation: had I gained, due to that intensified participation, a deeper inner understanding of the phenomenon observed?
Although somewhat disappointingly, I must admit, my “active” participation did not endow me with any special hermeneutic revelation. That conclusion reminds me of Murray’s and Haller’s critiques about the privileged knowledge the anthropologist must gain through participating in sex with informants. At the same time, however, I felt afterward—or perhaps only consoled myself—that I had gained some better credibility with my roommates and their friends. At last I was “normal.” Recalling Markowitz’s report (1999: 167), I proved to the people I wished to observe that I was “a sexual human being.” It allowed me, I believe, to observe later instances of sexual encounters in an unobtrusive manner, as much as to excuse myself without offense when invited to participate. Nevertheless, I have no proof that I might have been treated differently had I not shared in a sexual activity. In any case, I wish to emphasize, I had not consciously employed at that event the strategy suggested by Bolton. I reacted to the circumstances of the event I attended and to a sensual excitement surrounding me. I cannot claim that I was responding to an ideological or a professional conviction.
The Unannounced Observer
Although unrelated to sexual behavior, a more distressing situation arose during my observations of another group at the gay community center in Greenwich Village. I regularly attended the weekly meetings of a few SCA (Sexual Compulsives Anonymous) social groups (see Chapter 4). These meetings, similar in structure to those of Alcoholics Anonymous, are open to everybody, although the discussions are presumed to be confidential (e.g., Plummer 1995: 103–4). I never concealed my professional identity, but as at most other activities I attended at the Center I did not publicly announce my research interests. The presentation of my “true” identity, sexual and professional, seemed a difficult task at the Center. The lack of a single main focus of activity there (in contrast to the gay synagogue) made my persona far more obscure among its visitors.
Actually, I was not concerned at that time about the way I would ever use my field notes from the SCA meetings. For the time being, it was a natural extension of my work at the Center, since for my research I tried to attend as many group meetings there as possible. The issues the participants raised at the SCA meetings seemed particularly relevant to the work and literature dealing with anonymous sex and, in retrospect, to the issue of gay men’s subjectivity (Halperin 2007). Many of the male participants described painful experiences caused by their attraction to the various “oases” of anonymous sex. Never satisfied sexually and emotionally, they could not stop going back to these sites, which by their account seemed to ruin their lives. I became familiar with a few participants of one particular SCA group.
One participant, also engaged in the social sciences, was especially friendly to me. I believed that our mutual sympathy was stimulated by our professional kinship. However, to my great surprise (I assumed he was acquainted with my CBST ethnography), it took him a few months to comprehend that I was doing research. One day, as he saw me inquiring about a particular issue, he burst out in a tone of dismay: “Are you doing research?” To my matter-of-fact response he reacted with words I cannot forget: “I feel violated.” I believe he was offended, in particular, because his late revelation of my professional interest shattered the notion of a shared struggle that had sustained our relationship. He must have assumed that I experienced the same existential predicament that seemed to ruin his life.7 I was shocked and deeply moved by this expression of painful revelation and never went back to meetings at that particular group or to other SCA gatherings.
Could I justify my SCA observations in terms suggested, for example, by Humphreys (1975) and Henriksson (1995)? Would my findings redeem these people, as much as the other presumably
