Mildred Loving, whose marriage ended miscegenation laws in 1967

Mildred Loving passed away this year. This is a great story about the Loving case, which the Supreme Court ruled on in 1967 and did away with miscegenation laws. A great ending--Mildred Loving comes out publicly in support of gay marriage on the 40th anniversary of the 1967 ruling.

New York Times, December 28, 2008

Mildred Loving | b. 1940

The Color of Love

By SUSAN DOMINUS

In June 1963, Mildred Loving, the 22-year-old wife of Richard Loving, a bricklayer, sat down with a piece of lined loose-leaf paper and wrote a letter in neat script to the Washington branch of the A.C.L.U. “My husband is White,” she wrote, “I am part negro, & part indian.” Five years earlier, they married in Washington, she explained, but did not know that there was a law in Virginia, where they lived, against mixed marriages. Upon arriving back home, the two were jailed, tried and told to leave the state, which is how she ended up back in Washington. Her request to the A.C.L.U. was heartbreakingly humble: “We know we can’t live there, but we would like to go back once and awhile to visit our families & friends.” A judge had told them that if they set foot, together, in the state again, they would be jailed for one year. She hoped to hear from the lawyer there “real soon.”

The letter didn’t mention the details of the arrest: the three local authorities who let themselves into her mother’s home one hot June night, invaded the bedroom where Mildred and Richard slept and woke them with the blinding glare of a flashlight. She didn’t express the humiliation of spending five nights in a rat-infested jail (her husband, because he was white, spent only one night behind bars). She didn’t try to convey just how homesick she was for the small, rural speck of a town in Virginia where she had lived with her family all her life, just down the road from Richard, who started courting her when she was just 11 and he was 17.

Their relationship was, by all accounts, an uncomplicated love affair in Central Point, Va., an area in which racial divisions were far from straightforward. She and Richard grew up attending segregated churches and schools, but outside of those formal arenas, blacks and whites, many of whom also had Cherokee blood, freely socialized, worked side by side (Richard’s father worked for a black landowner) and occasionally fell in love. Richard first met Mildred when he went to hear her brothers play music at her home down the road.

Two young civil rights lawyers took up the case, and in 1967 the ruling came down from the Supreme Court, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren: Declaring that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” Warren argued that the Virginia statute violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. An unforgettable picture captures the Lovings at a news conference in their lawyers’ office the day of the ruling: Richard and Mildred, their heads leaning close, his arm draped possessively around her neck, Richard looking gruff, Mildred looking girlishly delighted. More than triumph, more than justice, the picture captured, at a glimpse, a couple in love.

In the years following the ruling, the Lovings turned down countless requests for interviews, public appearances and honors. Mildred Loving had no affiliations beyond her church and her family and never considered herself a hero. “It wasn’t my doing,” she said a year before her death. “It was God’s work.”

She resolutely lived out a private, ordinary life with its ordinary pleasures — a happy marriage, three kids, a home near family — and its sadly ordinary tragedies. One day when Mildred was 35, she and Richard were driving on a highway when another car crashed into theirs. Richard was killed instantly. Mildred, who lost her left eye in the accident, never remarried or considered it. She spent the second half of her life attending church, cooking for children and grandchildren, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, drinking cup after cup of instant coffee with the neighbors and looking out from her back porch to a peaceful view of the fields.

Civil rights historians had pretty much accepted that they wouldn’t hear again from Mildred Loving. But last year, the 40th anniversary of the ruling, three colleagues working on behalf of Faith in America, a gay rights group, visited Loving at the small ranch house that Richard built after they moved back to Virginia. The organization was hoping to persuade her to make a statement in favor of gay marriage at a celebration of her own court ruling that the group planned to hold in Washington. “I just don’t know,” Loving told them. She hadn’t given it much thought. She listened sympathetically, a worn Bible on her end table, as the group’s founder, the furniture entrepreneur Mitchell Gold, told her of his own struggles as a teenager to accept that society would never let him marry someone he loved. She was undecided when the group left a few hours later, but told Ashley Etienne, a young woman who consulted for the group, that they could continue to chat about the subject over the phone.

Etienne, who said Loving reminded her of her own grandmother, started calling every few days. She asked Loving about how she and her husband endured their setbacks; Loving told her that she didn’t understand why two people who loved each other could not be married and express their love publicly. She talked, as she always did, about how much she loved Richard and what a kind, gentle man he was. On her own, she talked to her neighbors about the request; she talked to her children about it. And in the end, Loving told Etienne, yes, she would allow the group to read a statement in her name supporting gay marriage at the commemoration. “Are you sure you understand what you’re saying?” Etienne asked. “You understand that you’re putting your name behind the idea that two men or two women should have the right to marry each other?”

“I understand it,” Loving said, “and I believe it."

Contextualizing Anne Alison's sarariman...

"Between 1986 and 1991, Japan had expanded by roughly the equivalent of France’s gross domestic product, then $956 billion. Japan was also outshining the United States, whose consumers bought most of its products and whose military provided its protection. In fact, its rise seemed to coincide with America’s slide...Then the double bubble turned into double trouble when both burst at the same time...The notion of Japan as a threat, a ninja-like adversary along the lines that Michael Crichton described in “Rising Sun,” suddenly seemed silly. No one worries much about Japan taking over the world today. When we wring our hands, it’s China we fear." Read the entire article here.

Women opting to become men in Albania

I had never heard of this practice, until I read this AP article, which appeared in my local paper. (This is from The Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 6, 2008.) It's yet another example of the cultural construction of gender. One of the most famous examples is women among the patrilineal Nuer, who, if they have no brothers, sometimes take on the male role and take a bride, whose children (by a biological male) belong to the patrilineage of their (biologically female) father.

Tradition of 'sworn virgins' dying out in Albania
By Elena Becatoros
The Associated Press

SHKODRA, Albania - Drene Markgjoni spent 12 years in a hard-labor camp, punished for her fiance's attempt to flee Albania's regime, then one of the world's most repressive and isolationist.

She swore she would never suffer like that for somebody else again.

She pledged to forgo sex and marriage for the rest of her life, and declared herself a man.

That was six decades ago. Now 85, with close-cropped white hair, dressed in a man's blue striped shirt and black trousers, she greets visitors with a manly handshake. The way she walks, her confident gestures, everything about her is masculine.

Only her voice - soft and feminine - reveals her to be one of the last sworn virgins in Albania: Women who dress, act and are treated as men.

"I am happier like this," she says. "I don't regret it at all. Not a hair on my head does."

In this strongly patriarchal society where for centuries women had virtually no standing, sworn virgins enjoyed the same rights and respect as men. They could inherit property, work for a living and sit on the village council, although without the right to vote.

The privileges came at a price. They took an oath of celibacy and could never have sexual relations. And they could never go back to being women.

There are no official figures, but Antonia Young, a research fellow at the University of Bradford in Britain who has studied the practice for more than a decade, estimates that Albania had about 100 sworn virgins in the early 1990s. That number is now almost certainly much lower, as the practice and the women die out.

The reasons for becoming a sworn virgin can be practical - the head of the family dies with no male heir. Or they can be emotional - the woman does not want to marry the man chosen for her.

In Albania, particularly in the impoverished rural north, it was practically inconceivable for a woman to remain single and live alone.

But by becoming a man, Markgjoni was free. She could earn a living and eat and drink with men instead of being restricted to the kitchen. And she could adopt two habits denied to a traditional Albanian woman: smoking and wearing a watch.

She says she has worked in carpentry and farming, and in construction in her youth when, she proudly exclaims, she carried concrete slabs with the strength of two men.

Markgjoni still works, though now her job is less physical: making rosaries for her Catholic church in the northern town of Shkodra.

"I have had much more respect with my people, my family," she says.

The practice of sworn virgins stems from the Kanun, medieval laws handed down orally for generations before being codified in the early 20th century. It transcends religion, with sworn virgins found among Albania's majority Muslim community as well as the minority Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

In Albania's male-dominated society, a woman had virtually no rights: According to the Kanun, "a woman is known as a sack, made to endure as long as she lives in her husband's house." She could not inherit property, and work was limited to child-rearing and household chores.

Anthropologists stress that the tradition of sworn virgins, with its emphasis on celibacy, does not equate with homosexuality, which did not become legal in Albania until the 1990s.

"It's kind of the opposite extreme," says Young. "In one way, sworn virgins support patriarchy, because they support the feeling that you've got to have a man at the head, and this woman can be a man."

On the other hand, Young notes, "this would be a way round for a woman who had homosexual inclinations."

Traditionally the decision to become a sworn virgin turned on social reasons like not having enough men in the family, but recently it has become more a matter of the woman's choice, Young says.

With a deep rumbling voice and a distinctive swagger, Diana Rakipi, a security guard at a clinic in the seaside town of Durres, explains she always had a masculine outlook.

Rakipi, 54, who trades her security guard's cap for a military beret when not in uniform, never felt much like a girl.

"I have never worn a skirt," she says during a break at work. "It was not imposed by anyone for me to do this, nobody made me wear these clothes. I chose it."

Her Christian Orthodox family accepted her decision, and she has enjoyed the respect of her relatives and community ever since, she says, with nobody questioning her right to earn a living as she chooses.

"Nobody dared to ask me why don't I get married," she says. "I am considered No. 1 in my family."

This is the last generation of sworn virgins, according to Aferdita Onuzi, a professor at Tirana's Cultural, Anthropology and Arts Research Institute. In Albania these days, women enter parliament, government ministries, and the police force.

Qamile Stema, of Barkanesh, is one of Albania's last generation of sworn virgins. (HEKTOR PUSTINA / AP)

When Qamile Stema was a child, there were two sworn virgins in Barkanesh, a village perched in the hills above the northern town of Kruje. Stema, the youngest of nine girls, decided to stay and take care of her mother when her three surviving elder sisters married and moved away.

Now 88, dressed in baggy pants with a black waistcoat over her shirt and sporting the traditional white woolen cap of northern Albanian Muslim men, Stema is Barkanesh's last sworn virgin. She has lived a freer, if lonelier, life, she says.

"I have talked with other men, traveled with other men, even teased the women," she says. "Even when I went to dances, I danced as a man."

She has the unwavering respect of her family, she says. She has no regrets.

"I decided never to marry and I don't complain for that decision," she says. "Especially nowadays, all the old people are alone. I am alone. I don't complain. Because their children have left, and they are not different from me, the couples."

"The XY Games": Jennifer Boylan

An important op-ed in today's Sunday Times on gender tests at the Olympics. Another sign of the increasing recognition of the existence of biologically-based gender ambiguity.

Boylan makes a number of significant and helpful observations:

First, on the non-binary nature of biological sex in human beings. (It's not just male/female.)

It would be nice to live in a world in which maleness and femaleness were firm and unwavering poles. People can be forgiven for wanting to live in a world as simple as this, a place in which something as basic as gender didn’t shift unsettlingly beneath our feet.

But gender is malleable and elusive, and we need to become comfortable with this fact, rather than afraid of it...

Most efforts to rigidly quantify the sexes are bound to fail. For every supposedly unmovable gender marker, there is an exception. There are women with androgen insensitivity, who have Y chromosomes. There are women who have had hysterectomies, women who cannot become pregnant, women who hate makeup, women whose object of affection is other women.

So what makes someone female then? If it’s not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to get pregnant, or femininity, or being attracted to men, then what is it, and how can you possibly test for it?

The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life, the lives we live each day. Surely the best judge of a person’s gender is not a degrading, questionable examination. The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart.

Second, on "XY" females.

Over the past 40 years, dozens of female athletes tested in this manner have tested “positively” for maleness. That’s because these tests don’t measure “maleness” or “femaleness.” They measure — and not always reliably — the presence of a Y chromosome, or Y chromosomal material, which no small number of females have.

The condition, known as androgen insensitivity, occurs in about 1 in 20,000 individuals. Basically, a woman may have a Y chromosome, but her body does not respond to the genetic information that it contains. Some women with androgen insensitivity live their lives unaware that they have it. By any measure, though (except the measure of the Olympic test), they are women.

Third, on transsexual Olympians:

You might think that gender testing at the Olympics is conducted to weed out transsexual women, who might be perceived to have some sort of physical advantage over natal females. Yet this is not the case. Since 2004, the International Olympic Committee has allowed transsexuals to compete as long as they have had sex-reassignment surgery and have gone through a minimum of two years of post-operative hormone replacement therapy.

Fourth, the conclusion:

Maybe this means that Olympic officials have to learn to live with ambiguity, and make peace with a world in which things are not always quantifiable and clear.

That, if you ask me, would be a good thing, not just for Olympians, but for us all.

Unfortunately, Boylan only discusses ambiguous chromosomes, not ambiguous genitalia (hermaphroditism). On this subject, see Anne Fausto-Sterling's "The Five Sexes, Revisited."

Another study of 'Gay Brains'

This one from Sweden. Doesn't prevent me from being skeptical. But here it is.

Salarymen Fight Back

Re Anne Allison's Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club:

Japan’s salarymen, famous for their work ethic and their corporate loyalty, fueled this nation’s industrial rise. But more recently, they have borne the brunt of its economic decline, enduring lower wages, job insecurity and long hours of unpaid overtime.

Read the complete article, from the New York Times, here.

Gay Unions Shed Light on Gender in Marriage (NY Times)

By TARA PARKER-POPE
New York Times, June 10, 2008

A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

The findings offer hope that some of the most vexing problems are not necessarily entrenched in deep-rooted biological differences between men and women. And that, in turn, offers hope that the problems can be solved.

Next week, California will begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, reigniting the national debate over gay marriage. But relationship researchers say it also presents an opportunity to study the effects of marriage on the quality of all relationships.

“When I look at what’s happening in California, I think there’s a lot to be learned to explore how human beings relate to one another,” said Sondra E. Solomon, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Vermont. “How people care for each other, how they share responsibility, power and authority — those are the key issues in relationships.”

The stereotype for same-sex relationships is that they do not last. But that may be due, in large part, to the lack of legal and social recognition given to same-sex couples. Studies of dissolution rates vary widely.

After Vermont legalized same-sex civil unions in 2000, researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 couples, including same-sex couples and their heterosexual married siblings. The focus was on how the relationships were affected by common causes of marital strife like housework, sex and money.

Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.

While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.

“Heterosexual married women live with a lot of anger about having to do the tasks not only in the house but in the relationship,” said Esther D. Rothblum, a professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University. “That’s very different than what same-sex couples and heterosexual men live with.”

Other studies show that what couples argue about is far less important than how they argue. The egalitarian nature of same-sex relationships appears to spill over into how those couples resolve conflict.

One well-known study used mathematical modeling to decipher the interactions between committed gay couples. The results, published in two 2003 articles in The Journal of Homosexuality, showed that when same-sex couples argued, they tended to fight more fairly than heterosexual couples, making fewer verbal attacks and more of an effort to defuse the confrontation.

Controlling and hostile emotional tactics, like belligerence and domineering, were less common among gay couples.

Same-sex couples were also less likely to develop an elevated heartbeat and adrenaline surges during arguments. And straight couples were more likely to stay physically agitated after a conflict.

“When they got into these really negative interactions, gay and lesbian couples were able to do things like use humor and affection that enabled them to step back from the ledge and continue to talk about the problem instead of just exploding,” said Robert W. Levenson, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings suggest that heterosexual couples need to work harder to seek perspective. The ability to see the other person’s point of view appears to be more automatic in same-sex couples, but research shows that heterosexuals who can relate to their partner’s concerns and who are skilled at defusing arguments also have stronger relationships.

One of the most common stereotypes in heterosexual marriages is the “demand-withdraw” interaction, in which the woman tends to be unhappy and to make demands for change, while the man reacts by withdrawing from the conflict. But some surprising new research shows that same-sex couples also exhibit the pattern, contradicting the notion that the behavior is rooted in gender, according to an abstract presented at the 2006 meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by Sarah R. Holley, a psychology researcher at Berkeley.

Dr. Levenson says this is good news for all couples.

“Like everybody else, I thought this was male behavior and female behavior, but it’s not,” he said. “That means there is a lot more hope that you can do something about it.”

Gay Marriage? Useful Hetero Cautionary Advice

From "Happily Ever After," by Annebelle Gurwich, courtesy The Nation.

"Research from University of Southern California sociologist Kelly Musick suggests that most couples will likely spend half of their married lives less happy than they were when they cut the first slice of wedding cake. In fact, debunking that old seven-year-itch theory, participants reported the spark fizzling after only three years. Moreover, the latest census data indicate that singles now outnumber married people in the US, with fewer couples reaching that twenty-five-year milestone, all of which seems to confirm that people are just unwilling to settle for being unhappy."

Read the entire essay here.

The "Toe-Tapping Menace"

This is the first sensible "mainstream" commentary I've seen on the Sen. Larry Craig "scandal." (Admittedly, if I was spending my time reading more extensively on the subject, I might have found more.) Are men who "cruise" in public restrooms a menace? No! Is Sen. Larry Craig "gay"? Probably not, unless one is operating according to a rigid conceptual framework that there are only two types of people, and that if a male has sex with another male, that necessarily makes him "gay." According to this logic, the fact that he may also have sex with his wife means that he is just "fooling" himself about his true sexual orientation. But--isn't it possible that Craig could be "bi"? Or better yet, wouldn't it make more sense to think just in terms of sexual acts, rather than trying to read essential identities off of these sexual acts?

Does the fact that Craig has been convicted of a misdemeanor for a victimless crime require that he be run out of DC on a rail? Why are supposedly liberal-minded people jumping up and down with glee because another "hypocritical" family-values Republican has been exposed and punished? Shouldn't we instead be opposing such useless policing activities? And shouldn't we be struggling against the "politics of shame" that Michael Warner writes about so compellingly in The Trouble with Normal, the politics of shame that ruined the reputation of Bill Clinton and thousands of everyday folks who refuse sexual "normalcy"?

New York Times, September 2, 2007
America’s Toe-Tapping Menace
By Laura M. MacDonald

WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.

In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.

That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.

Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”

Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.

Mr. Humphreys broke down these transactions into phases, which are remarkably similar to the description of Senator Craig’s behavior given by the police. First is the approach: Mr. Craig allegedly peeks into the stall. Then comes positioning: he takes the stall next to the policeman. Signaling: Senator Craig allegedly taps his foot and touches it to the officer’s shoe, which was positioned close to the divider, then slides his hand along the bottom of the stall. There are more phases in Mr. Humphreys’s full lexicon — maneuvering, contracting, foreplay and payoff — but Mr. Craig was arrested after the officer presumed he had “signaled.”

Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig’s intentions, the police entrapped him. If the police officer hadn’t met his stare, answered that tap or done something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr. Humphreys was adamant and explicit: “On the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been ‘molested’ in such a setting without first having ‘given his consent.’ ”

As for those who feel that a family man and a conservative senator would be unlikely to engage in such acts, Mr. Humphreys’s research says otherwise. As a former Episcopal priest and closeted gay man himself, he was surprised when he interviewed his subjects to learn that most of them were married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.

In other words, not only did these men have nice families, they had nice families who seemed to believe what the fathers loudly preached about the sanctity of marriage. Mr. Humphreys called this paradox “the breastplate of righteousness.” The more a man had to lose by having a secret life, the more he acquired the trappings of respectability: “His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of his practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous — an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking.”

Mr. Humphreys even anticipated the vehement denials of men who are outed: “The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man, hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited.”

This last sentence brings to mind the hollow refutations of figures at the center of many recent public sex scandals, heterosexual and homosexual, notably Representative Mark Foley, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Senator David Vitter and now Senator Craig. The difference is that Larry Craig was arrested.

Public sex is certainly a public nuisance, but criminalizing consensual acts does not help. “The only harmful effects of these encounters, either direct or indirect, result from police activity,” Mr. Humphreys wrote. “Blackmail, payoffs, the destruction of reputations and families, all result from police intervention in the tearoom scene.” What community can afford to lose good citizens?

And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.

Laura M. Mac Donald is the author of “The Curse of the Narrows: The Story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion.”

"Career Women In Japan Find A Blocked Path": NYT

An article in the August 6 New York Times provides a useful update on women in management positions in Japan. Useful in particular as supplementary material for Anne Allison's Nightwork, her ethnography on the sararimen of Japan.

Here are some key excerpts:

In 1985, women held just 6.6 percent of all management jobs in Japanese companies and government, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. By 2005, that number had risen to only 10.1 percent, though Japan’s 27 million working women made up nearly half of its work force. By contrast, women held 42.5 percent of managerial jobs in the United States in 2005, the organization said.

Experts on women’s issues say outright prejudice is only part of Japan’s problem. An even bigger barrier to the advancement of women is the nation’s notoriously demanding corporate culture, particularly its expectation of morning-to-midnight work hours...

Even with cases of blatant discrimination, lawsuits remain rare because of a cultural aversion to litigation. Another big problem has been that the equal opportunity law [passed in 1985] is essentially toothless. Despite two revisions, the law includes no real punishment for companies that continue to discriminate...

Still, women’s rights advocates say that the realities of Japan’s shrinking population are slowly forcing change. They say the need to find talented workers has pushed a small but growing number of companies to make more efforts to hire women as “sogo shoku,” or career-track employees, in line for management. Some analysts estimate that about a quarter of career-track hires in recent years have been women.

As women penetrate the workforce in East Asia, gendered changes in corporate culture

Anne Allison's important ethnography, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club, shows how the (mandatory) after-hours socializing of Japanese businessmen ("sararimen") at hostess clubs produces a form of masculine identity that accords with the needs of the corporation. This New York Times article, although it concerns corporate culture in South Korea, perhaps suggests ways in which gendered corporate culture may be changing in Japan as well, as women penetrate managerial and professional levels.

"Corporate Korea Corks the Bottle as Women Rise"
By NORIMITSU ONISHI, New York Times, June 10, 2007

SEOUL, South Korea — In a time-honored practice in South Korea’s corporate culture, the 38-year-old manager at an online game company took his 10-person team on twice-weekly after-work drinking bouts. He exhorted his subordinates to drink, including a 29-year-old graphic designer who protested that her limit was two glasses of beer.

“Either you drink or you get it from me tomorrow,” the boss told her one evening.

She drank, fearing that refusing to do so would hurt her career. But eventually, unable to take the drinking any longer, she quit and sued.

In May, in the first ruling of its kind, the Seoul High Court said that forcing a subordinate to drink alcohol was illegal, and it pronounced the manager guilty of a “violation of human dignity.” The court awarded the woman $32,000 in damages for the incidents, which occurred in 2004.

The ruling was as much a testament to women’s growing presence in corporate life here as a confirmation of changes already under way. As an increasing number of women have joined companies as professionals in the past half decade, corporate South Korea has struggled to change the country’s thoroughly male-centered corporate culture, starting with alcohol.

An evening out with colleagues here follows a predictable, alcohol-centered pattern: dinner, usually some grilled pork, washed down with soju, Korea’s national vodkalike drink; then a second round at a beer hall; then whiskey and singing at a “norae bang,” a Korean karaoke club. Exhorted by their bosses to drink, the corporate warriors bond, literally, so that the sight of dark-suited men holding hands, leaning on one another, staggering toward taxis, is part of this city’s nighttime streetscape. The next morning, back at the office, they are ready to fight, with reaffirmed unity, for more markets at home and abroad.

Many professional women manage to avoid much of the drinking by adopting well-known strategies. They slip away while their male colleagues indulge in a second or third round of drinking. They pour the drinks into potted plants. They rely on male colleagues, called “knights in shining armor,” to take their turns in drinking games.

Companies, too, have begun to respond. Since 2005, Posco, the steel manufacturer, has limited company outings to two hours at its mill in South Korea’s southwest. Employees can raise a red card if they do not want to drink or a yellow card if they want to go home early. At Woori Bank, one of South Korea’s largest, an alarm rings at 10 p.m. to encourage workers to stop drinking and go home using public transportation, which stops running before midnight.

“My boss used to be all about, ‘Let’s drink till we die!’ ” said Wi Su-jung, a 31-year-old woman employed at a small shipping company.

Ms. Wi, who was out enjoying the sun in downtown Seoul, said the atmosphere began changing as more women joined her company in the past couple of years. “The women got together and complained about the drinking and the pressure to drink,” she said. “So things changed last year. Now we sometimes go to musicals or movies instead.”

Kim Chil-jong, who was taking a walk on his lunch hour, said he owned a nine-person publishing company. In the last couple of years, he hired two women for the first time.

“We drink less because of their presence,” Mr. Kim, 47, said. “Before, I’d encourage my workers to drink whenever we went out, but I don’t do that anymore.”

Still, at least 90 percent of company outings — called “hoishik,” or coming together to eat — still center on alcohol, according to the Korean Alcohol Research Foundation. The percentage of women who drink has increased over all as they have joined companies.

Over all, South Koreans consume less alcohol than, say, most Europeans, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a research organization financed by industrialized nations.

But Cho Sung-gie, the alcohol foundation’s research director, estimates that South Koreans rank first in binge drinking: the goal is to drink as much as possible, as quickly as possible, so that co-workers loosen up.

Companies have awakened to the potential dangers of bingeing: health threats, decreased productivity and, with more women working, the risk of sexual harassment.

The foundation, though financed largely by the alcohol industry, is considered the authority on the country’s drinking culture. It runs programs on responsible drinking and abstinence, and assists companies to organize outings not centered on alcohol. Chang Kih-wung, a manager in the education team, has even joined company outings to the movies.

“Usually, a company decides to do something about drinking after a guest, often a foreigner, visits and makes a comment like, ‘Man, people drink like crazy here!’ ” Mr. Chang said. “So they’ll invite me for a lecture or organize a single activity — then they forget about it and go back to drinking.”

Traditionally, this corporate culture often began at the job interview itself. Asked whether they liked to drink, applicants knew that there was only one correct answer.

“If they said they didn’t drink, we’d think that we couldn’t work closely together,” said Lee Jai-ho, 40, an engineer at a paper mill that was bought by Norske Skog of Sweden in the late 1990s.

Mr. Lee said he was asked whether he was a good drinker during his job interview in 1992, and he asked the same question of job candidates later. The company’s hard-drinking culture changed, however, after it changed to foreign ownership.

It is this fear of not being accepted as full members of the team that has led many women to drink to excess. A 31-year-old lawyer for a telecommunications company, who asked that her name not be used, blacked out during a company outing shortly after she became the first Korean woman to serve as a lawyer in the legal division three years ago. “During my studies, I always competed against men,” she said. “So I didn’t want to lose to men at hoishik.”

She drank so much during dinner at a Chinese restaurant that she remembered nothing past 9 p.m., though the outing lasted until 1 a.m.

However, as more women have joined her division, she said, the emphasis on alcohol has decreased.

“Before it was always grilled pork with soju followed by mixed drinks,” she said. “Now, I can suggest that we go to a Thai or Italian restaurant.”

Not all men were so flexible, though. In the case of the 29-year-old graphic designer, when she was interviewed at the 240-employee online game company in 2004, she was also forced to submit to an “alcohol interview,” according to the court ruling. She could drink only two glasses of beer and no soju at all, she said.

Her boss, though, liked to go out with his 10-person marketing team — six men and four women — at least twice a week until the predawn hours and brooked no excuses.

One time, he told her that if she called upon a “knight in shining armor,” she would have to kiss him. So she drank two glasses of soju. Another time, after she slipped away early, he called her at home and ordered her to come back. She refused.

At the trial, the boss said he was so intent on having his subordinates bond that he sometimes used his own money to take them out drinking. He called the woman a weirdo and said of the lawsuit, “I’m the victim.”

Vogueing: Alive and Well

I frequently show Jennie Livingston's great documentary, Paris Is Burning, in my gender/sexuality classes, and this article does a great job of updating us on the voguing scene, which not only remains vital, but has spread far beyond New York City.

New York Times, May 22, 2005 Sunday (Style Section, Pg. 1)
"Still Striking A Pose," by Guy Trebay

SELVIN KOOL-AID GIVENCHY was stalking the runway, letting fly his hands and his wild invective. ''Work it, girls! Serve it like a legend!'' said Mr. Givenchy, who is something of an underground legend himself, what with his Moms Mabley mug, his colossally oversize sweatshirt and a mouth that would make that raunchy comedian's seem snowflake pure. ''Remember,'' Mr. Givenchy commanded the ladies, although ladies was not the word he employed. ''I am in charge of the girls!''

The girls were not girls, of course, and the boys not boys. The runway was a makeshift theater on which, over the course of a long evening, the girls and the boys would stomp and pose and parade and dance attired in zoot suits or chiffon dresses or else very little at all. The gathering was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the New York-based House of Ultra-Omni, one of the last of the original drag queen houses whose balls proliferated in the 1980's, then faded from memory and, seemingly, disappeared.

Whatever vague awareness most Americans may have of this bygone scene probably comes from Madonna's ''Vogue,'' the influential 1990 hit that was either an act of homage to the underground that inspired it or one of creative larceny. A fuller introduction was provided by ''Paris Is Burning,'' Jennie Livingston's 1991 documentary, a remarkably clear-eyed appraisal of the epoch and the quirky ''legends'' who gave it birth.

No one can say for sure when or how voguing seemed to vanish, and with it the houses that brought it into the world. Those houses constituted groups of gay men organized and run by ''mothers'' and ''fathers,'' populated by ''children'' and named for fashion designers no one involved had ever met. Then and now, even people who were in on the scene might have been forgiven for assuming that its practitioners had moved on in the decade after ''Vogue'' and ''Paris Is Burning,'' or, as likely, were now dead.

The reality, it turns out, is astonishingly different. True, AIDS decimated the ball world, carrying away many of its founders. But far from fading out, the balls survived and are being revived by a new generation that has exported them from the urban centers where they first flourished to the Sun Belt and the Midwest.

Balls are now being staged almost every weekend in cities like St. Louis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit. The House of Ultra-Omni alone has branches in 10 states. A dozen or more Web sites are devoted to the scene, which also has its own magazine and newsletter and is the subject of a new documentary that brings things vividly up to date. "How Do I Look" was filmed over the past decade by the German filmmaker Wolfgang Busch; fresh from making the rounds of an academic circuit still eager for tales from the gender front, the film will be released on DVD next month.

''People thought it all ended with 'Paris Is Burning,''' said Wayne Tanks, the father of the Wisconsin chapter of the House of Ultra-Omni. Along with dozens of other children, Mr. Tanks had traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate his house's quarter-century mark. ''But we're still here.''

In Los Angeles this was made abundantly clear as members arrived to represent venerable houses like Ninja, Versace, Mugler, Cavalli, Moschino, Bizarre, Blahnik, Givenchy, Balenciaga and Prestige. Mothers and fathers and children from each of these clans descended on a Westin hotel near L.A.X., curiously resplendent beings whose existence gave proof to the survival of an implausible phenomenon conjured from the raw material of hard lives.

They came to commemorate, to celebrate, to dance and posture and do serious battle on a catwalk in an overlighted banquet room. They also came, if one may borrow back a phrase from Madonna, to strike a pose.

''When I first heard about the houses, I thought, this culture is so underground,'' said Brandon Harp, a member of the Atlanta House of Ultra-Omni. ''Then I found that, in places like Kentucky, where I had never been, people knew who I am and what my best category is.''

Mr. Harp arrived in Los Angeles prepared to walk in a category called Butch Queen Realness, a kind of extravagantly performed commentary on self-presentation, in which an out gay man impersonates an apparently straight or closeted gay man by wearing a costume that exaggeratedly telegraphs masculinity. Mordant social commentary has always been at the core of the voguing balls, and long before academia institutionalized the notion that gender is performance, the ball children were tartly making the same point at elaborate fetes where competing groups vied to outdo each other at caricaturing the masks of sex. Wealth and power, it should be mentioned, also tend to come in for some sharp appraisal at these gatherings, critiques the more pointed because ball children have historically possessed little of either.

Throughout their history, ball children have strutted down improvised runways in categories like ''executive realness,'' ''femme attitude'' and ''sex-siren effect.'' The costumes they donned were most memorably of the feather boa sort. But, just as often their ''drag'' runs to ''executive'' suits and wingtips or else do-rags and Timberlands worn by Down Low types.

In the past the ball children battled in gay clubs and leased Elks halls. They took trophies and earned credibility and status on a circuit that was both intricately networked and, at the same time, so seemingly informal one would think the balls were arranged ad hoc. All that has changed, Mr. Tanks said. Thirty members of his house split their time between working up ensembles for catwalk competitions and creating outreach programs promoting ''awareness and prevention of H.I.V.'' and other forms of sexually transmitted disease.

Social service was a galaxy away from anyone's concerns at the Westin hotel on this spring evening, as the ball children tucked into a dinner of poached chicken and mesclun with slices of Brie. The meal was a marked departure from balls of the past, where the food, if there was any, tended to be chips or pretzels or anything useful at soaking up booze. If not an entirely sober occasion, the 25th anniversary of the House of Ultra-Omni was a Kiwanis picnic by contrast with the frenzied, and often drug-stoked, blowouts of earlier days.

Still, it was a serious ball, serious meaning frivolous to a nearly demented degree. As Mr. Givenchy repeated any number of times, ''The girls better serve it serious, they better work, and they better come out here punishing my runway with a nasty attitude and a sickening walk.'' Irony being mother's milk in the ball world, words like sick and nasty and over (or ''ovah'') are terms of the highest approbation: Webster's take note.

Of all the contributions the ball world has made to culture, dance is probably the most durable, athough that oddly seems to have escaped much scholarly notice. ''Voguing is truly an evolution of ancient African dance forms rehearsed and refined into a form of first-world party artistry,'' explained Muhammad Ultra-Omni, real name Salaudin Muhammad, before taking to the stage in a white linen suit and a white straw hat whose crown was cut out to allow for his fountain of dreadlocks.

Once onstage Mr. Muhammad put in play the stylized walks and poses and dips and spins and chest poppings and stupefying dead drops that have qualified him for legendary status on a scene where legend is a hard-won formal honorific.

''Break dancers get together and do stuff like this, and it's fully accepted,'' said Willi Ninja, surely the most celebrated dancer ever produced by the ballrooms, speaking in a mainstream sense. ''If Madonna does voguing, it's O.K.,'' he added. ''But when the ball children dance, even now, people say, 'Oh, it's a bunch of crazy queens throwing themselves on the floor.'''

Yet even the most skeptical observer would have trouble disputing that real artistry is involved when Muhammad or Ninja takes the floor. And not even a churl could keep from being charmed by the House of Cavalli, a posse of refrigerator-size men who swept into the Westin ballroom near midnight wearing demure French twists and dresses of diaphanous chiffon that had to have been cut from acre-sized bolts.

To the chanted (and entirely unprintable) exhortations of Mr. Givenchy, each performer took his thrashing, popping, stalking, prancing or whirling turn on the runway and posed and performed in a way that one contestant described as ''so nasty and ovah it's sick.''

The clear high point of the evening, for this observer at least, was reached when Warner McPherson, also known as Hershey Ultra-Omni, pranced onstage with his lean body oiled and naked but for a G-string kitted out with plastic Wal-Mart foliage. In a blur that lasted less than three minutes, Mr. McPherson miraculously managed to conjure the entire history of voguing in a performance so stylized and manic that inspired is hardly an adequate word. It was possessed.

''Work it, Miss Hershey! Bring it! Serve it! Show them girls how it's really done!'' The voice belonged to Kevin Burrus, or Kevin Ultra-Omni, who helped found the house of that name 25 years ago in New York. ''You know, seeing Hershey makes me emotional,'' explained Mr. Burrus, as his protege performed. ''After all that we have been through, with the AIDS and the drugs and the death and the homophobia, I see Hershey dancing and realize that the ball children are still strong and still out here, carrying on.''

Same-Sex Public Displays of Affection

This article is about as good an account of "hetenormativity" and the un-marked and usually unnoticed limits it imposes upon everyday behavior as you can get. (As an aside, last year a female friend of mine was nuzzling with her girlfriend right behind a Dickson street eatery in downtown Fayetteville. A guy passing by in his truck, his girlfriend in tow, leapt out and punched my friend hard in the face, and then jumped back in the truck and drove off. Luckily my friend didn't get her nose broken, but she looked terrible from the assault. The matter was reported to the police but the perp has never been caught.) See Snickers ad here.

New York Times, February 18, 2007
A Kiss Too Far?
By Guy Trebay

The spot was only 30 seconds, almost a blur amid the action at the Super Bowl. Yet the hubbub after a recent commercial showing two auto mechanics accidentally falling into lip-lock while eating the same Snickers bar went a long way toward showing how powerfully charged a public kiss between two men remains.

Football is probably as good a place as any to look for the limits of social tolerance. And the Snickers commercial — amusing to some, appalling to others and ultimately withdrawn by the company that makes the candy — had the inadvertent effect of revealing how a simple display of affection grows in complexity as soon as one considers who gets to demonstrate it in public, and who, very often, does not.

The demarcation seemed particularly stark during the week of Valentine’s Day, when the aura of love cast its rosy Hallmark glow over card-store cash registers and anyone with a pulse. Where, one wondered, were all the same-sex lovers making out on street corners, or in comedy clubs, performance spaces, flower shops or restaurants?

“There’s really a kind of Potemkin village quality to the tolerance and acceptance” of gay people in America, said Clarence Patton, a spokesman for the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. “The idea of it is O.K., but the reality falls short.”

Provided gay people agree to “play a very tightly scripted and choreographed role in society, putting your wedding together or what have you, we’re not threatening,” Mr. Patton said. “But people are still verbally harassed and physically attacked daily for engaging in simple displays of affection in public. Everything changes the minute we kiss.”

The lugs in the Snickers commercial recoiled in shock at their smooch, resorting to “manly” behavior like tearing out their chest hair in clumps. Alternate endings to the commercial on a Snickers Web site showed the two clobbering each other, and related video clips featured players from the Super Bowl teams reacting, not unexpectedly, with squeamish distaste. The outrage voiced by gay rights groups similarly held little surprise.

“This type of jeering from professional sports figures at the sight of two men kissing fuels the kind of anti-gay bullying that haunts countless gay and lesbian schoolchildren on playgrounds across the country,” Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. A spokesman for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation condemned the advertisement as “inexcusable.” Masterfoods USA, a division of Mars and the maker of Snickers, withdrew the offending ads.

But for some the commercial left the lingering question of who owns the kiss? How is it that a simple affectionate gesture can be so loaded? Why is it that behavioral latitudes permit couples of one sort to indulge freely in public displays lusty enough to suggest short-term motel stays, while entire populations, albeit minority ones, live real-time versions of the early motion picture Hays Code: a peck on the cheek in public, one foot squarely planted on the floor?

The freedom to kiss in public is hardly the most compelling issue for most gay rights advocates, or perhaps even in the minds of many gay Americans. Yet the symbolic weight of simple gestures remains potent, a point easy to observe wherever on the sexual spectrum one falls. “Whose issue is it? Why is it only a gay issue?” said Robert Morea, a fitness consultant in New York.

Although Mr. Morea is heterosexual, his client list has long included a number of high-profile professionals, the majority of them gay women and men. “The issue is there because for so many years, people got beaten up, followed or yelled at,” he said. “Even for me as a straight man, it’s obvious how social conditioning makes it hard for people to take back the public space.”

After considering herself exclusively lesbian for decades, Sarah Van Arsdale, a novelist, not long ago found, to her surprise, that she had fallen in love with a man. At first, as she wrote last week in an e-mail message from a writer’s colony in Oaxaca, Mexico, “ Whenever we would hold hands in public, I felt a frisson of fear, waiting for the customary dirty looks or at least for the customary looking-away.”

In place of revulsion, Ms. Van Arsdale was startled to discover that, having adjusted her sexual identity, she was now greeted by strangers with approving smiles. “I felt suddenly acceptable and accepted and cute, as opposed to queer,” she said.

While few are likely to have shared Ms. Van Arsdale’s singular perspective, her experience is far from exceptional. “I’m a very openly gay man,” said Dane Clark, who manages rental properties and flies a rainbow flag from his house in Kansas City, Kan. “My partner and I don’t go kissing in public. I live in probably the most liberal part of the State of Kansas, but it’s not exactly liberal. If I was to go to a nice restaurant nearby and kiss my partner, I don’t think that would go over very well.”

As many gay men have before him, Mr. Clark chose to live in a city rather than the sort of small town where he was raised in the hope that Kansas City would provide a greater margin of tolerance and also of safety. Even in nearby Independence, Mo., he said, “if you kiss your partner in a restaurant, you could find somebody waiting for you outside when you went to the car.”

But haven’t things changed radically from the days when lesbians and gay men were considered pariahs, before gay marriage initiatives became ballot issues, before Ellen DeGeneres was picked to host the Oscars, and cable TV staples like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” made a competitive sport of group hugs?

In some senses and in certain places, apparently, they have. The landscape of acceptance, as the Snickers commercial inadvertently illustrated, is constantly shifting — broadening in one place and contracting somewhere else. The country in which anti-gay advocates like the Rev. Fred Phelps once drew headlines for picketing Matthew Shepard’s funeral and preaching what was called “a Day-Glo vision of hatred” can seem very far away at times from the laissez-faire place in which an estimated 70 percent of Americans say they know someone who is gay.

“We don’t administrate public displays of affection,” said Andrew Shields, World Church Secretary of the Community of Christ, a Christian evangelical church with headquarters in Independence. “Homosexuality is still in discussion in our church. But our denominational point of view is that we uphold the worth of all persons, and there is no controversy on whether people have a right to express themselves.”

The tectonics of attitude are shifting in subtle ways that are geographic, psychic and also generational, suggested Katherine M. Franke, a lesbian who teaches law and is a director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University. “I’ve been attacked on the street and called all sorts of names” for kissing a female partner in public, Professor Franke said. “The reception our affection used to generate was violence and hatred,” she added. “What I’ve found in the last five years is that my girlfriend and I get smiles from straight couples, especially younger people. Now there’s almost this aggressive sense of ‘Let me tell you how terrific we think that is.’ ”

Yet gay-bashing still occurs routinely, Mr. Patton of the Anti-Violence Project said, even in neighborhoods like Chelsea in Manhattan, where the sight of two men kissing on the street can hardly be considered a frighten-the-horses proposition. “In January some men were leaving a bar in Chelsea,” saying goodbye with a kiss, Mr. Patton said. “One friend got into a taxi and then a car behind the taxi stopped and some guys jumped out and beat up the other two.” One victim of the attack, which is under investigation by the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, was bruised and shaken. The second had a broken jaw.

“The last time I was called a faggot was on Eighth Avenue,” said Joe Windish, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Milledgeville, Ga., with his partner of many years. “I don’t have that here, and I’m an out gay man,” said Mr. Windish, whose neighbors in what he termed “the reddest of the red states” may be fundamentalist Christians who oppose gay marriages and even civil unions, but “who all like me personally.”

Tolerance has its limits, though, as Mr. Windish found when he and his partner took a vacation on a sleepy island off the coast of Georgia. “I became aware that if I held my partner’s hand, or kissed him in public, the friendliness would stop,” he said.

What Mr. Windish calls a level of peril is possibly always in play, and this no doubt has something to do with the easily observed reality that a public kiss between two people of the same sex remains an unusual occurrence, and probably not because most are holding out for the chance to lock lips over a hunk of milk chocolate, roasted peanuts and caramel.

“We forget here, because New York has been relatively safe for a while, that hate is a problem,” said Roger Padilha, an owner of MAO public relations in New York. The reminders surface in everyday settings, he said, and in ordinary ways.

“My boyfriend and I always hold hands and, when we feel like it, we kiss,” Mr. Padilha said. Yet some weeks back, at a late movie in a Times Square theater, as Mr. Padilha went to rest his hand on his partner’s leg — a gesture it would seem that movie theaters were invented to facilitate — he recoiled as sharply as had one of the Snickers ad guys.

“He was like: ‘Don’t do that. It’s too dangerous,’ ” Mr. Padilha said. “And afterward I thought, you know, my dad isn’t super into P.D.A.’s, but nobody’s ever going to beat him up because he’s kissing my mom at a movie. I kept thinking: What if my boyfriend got hit by a car tomorrow? When I had the chance to kiss him, why didn’t I?”

51% of (U.S.) Women Are Now Living Without Spouse

Here's that widely-cited NYT article. I particularly like this quote from Sheila Jamison: “I have not sworn off marriage, but if I do wed, it will be to have a companion with whom I can travel and play parlor games in my old age.”

January 16, 2007, The New York Times
51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse
By SAM ROBERTS

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

In addition, marriage rates among black women remain low. Only about 30 percent of black women are living with a spouse, according to the Census Bureau, compared with about 49 percent of Hispanic women, 55 percent of non-Hispanic white women and more than 60 percent of Asian women.

In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military or are institutionalized. But while most women eventually marry, the larger trend is unmistakable.

“This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives,” said Prof. Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. “Most of these women will marry, or have married. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage.”

Professor Coontz said this was probably unprecedented with the possible exception of major wartime mobilizations and when black couples were separated during slavery.

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, described the shift as “a clear tipping point, reflecting the culmination of post-1960 trends associated with greater independence and more flexible lifestyles for women.”

“For better or worse, women are less dependent on men or the institution of marriage,” Dr. Frey said. “Younger women understand this better, and are preparing to live longer parts of their lives alone or with nonmarried partners. For many older boomer and senior women, the institution of marriage did not hold the promise they might have hoped for, growing up in an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ era.”

Emily Zuzik, a 32-year-old musician and model who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, said she was not surprised by the trend.

“A lot of my friends are divorced or single or living alone,” Ms. Zuzik said. “I know a lot of people in their 30s who have roommates.”

Ms. Zuzik has lived with a boyfriend twice, once in California where the couple registered as domestic partners to qualify for his health insurance plan. “I don’t plan to live with anyone else again until I am married,” she said, “and I may opt to keep a place of my own even then.”

Linda Barth, a 56-year-old magazine editor in Houston who has never married, said, “I used to divide my women friends into single friends and married friends. Now that doesn’t seem to be an issue.”

Sheila Jamison, who also lives in the East Village and works for a media company, is 45 and single. She says her family believes she would have had a better chance of finding a husband had she attended a historically black college instead of Duke.

“Considering all the weddings I attended in the ’80s that have ended so very, very badly, I consider myself straight up lucky,” Ms. Jamison said. “I have not sworn off marriage, but if I do wed, it will be to have a companion with whom I can travel and play parlor games in my old age.”

Carol Crenshaw, 57, of Roswell, Ga., was divorced in 2005 after 33 years and says she is in no hurry to marry again.

“I’m in a place in my life where I’m comfortable,” said Ms. Crenshaw, who has two grown sons. “I can do what I want, when I want, with whom I want. I was a wife and a mother. I don’t feel like I need to do that again.”

Similarly, Shelley Fidler, 59, a public policy adviser at a law firm, has sworn off marriage. She moved from rural Virginia to the vibrant Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., when her 30-year marriage ended.

“The benefits were completely unforeseen for me,” Ms. Fidler said, “the free time, the amount of time I get to spend with friends, the time I have alone, which I value tremendously, the flexibility in terms of work, travel and cultural events.”

Among the more than 117 million women over the age of 15, according to the marital status category in the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey, 63 million are married. Of those, 3.1 million are legally separated and 2.4 million said their husbands were not living at home for one reason or another.

That brings the number of American women actually living with a spouse to 57.5 million, compared with the 59.9 million who are single or whose husbands were not living at home when the survey was taken in 2005.

Some of those situations, which the census identifies as “spouse absent” and “other,” are temporary, and, of course, even some people who describe themselves as separated eventually reunite with their spouses.

Over all, a larger share of men are married and living with their spouse — about 53 percent compared with 49 percent among women.

“Since women continue to outlive men, they have reached the nonmarital tipping point — more nonmarried than married,” Dr. Frey said. “This suggests that most girls growing up today can look forward to spending more of their lives outside of a traditional marriage.”

Pamela J. Smock, a researcher at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, agreed, saying that “changing patterns of courtship, marriage, and that we are living longer lives all play a role.”

“Men also remarry more quickly than women after a divorce,” Ms. Smock added, “and both are increasingly likely to cohabit rather than remarry after a divorce.”

The proportion of married people, especially among younger age groups, has been declining for decades. Between 1950 and 2000, the share of women 15-to-24 who were married plummeted to 16 percent, from 42 percent. Among 25-to-34-year-olds, the proportion dropped to 58 percent, from 82 percent.

“Although we can help people ‘do’ marriage better, it is simply delusional to construct social policy or make personal life decisions on the basis that you can count on people spending most of their adult lives in marriage,” said Professor Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”

Besse Gardner, 24, said she and her boyfriend met as college freshmen and started living together last April “for all the wrong reasons” — they found a great apartment on the beach in Los Angeles.

“We do not see living together as an end or even for the rest of our lives — it’s just fun right now,” Ms. Gardner said. “My roommate is someone I’d be thrilled to marry one day, but it just doesn’t make sense right now.”

Ms. Crenshaw said that some of the women in her support group for divorced women were miserable, but that she was surprised how happy she was to be single again.

“That’s not how I grew up,” she said. “That’s not how society thinks. It’s a marriage culture.”

Elissa B. Terris, 59, of Marietta, Ga., divorced in 2005 after being married for 34 years and raising a daughter, who is now an adult.

“A gentleman asked me to marry him and I said no,” she recalled. “I told him, ‘I’m just beginning to fly again, I’m just beginning to be me. Don’t take that away.’ ”

“Marriage kind of aged me because there weren’t options,” Ms. Terris said. “There was only one way to go. Now I have choices. One night I slept on the other side of the bed, and I thought, I like this side.”

She said she was returning to college to get a master’s degree (her former husband “didn’t want me to do that because I was more educated than he was”), had taken photography classes and was auditioning for a play.

“Once you go through something you think will kill you and it doesn’t,” she said, “every day is like a present.”

Ariel Sabar, Brenda Goodman and Maureen Balleza contributed reporting.

NYT: Gender Pay Gap, Once Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place

Important article from the Christmas eve New York Times, showing that the gender pay gap between men and women is stuck at about 75/100. The article says there are two points of view as to why this has happened, which can be summarized as the structural and the individual. According to the view that emphasizes structure, "If the government offered day-care programs similar to those in other countries or men spent more time caring for family members, women would have greater opportunity to pursue whatever job they wanted, according to this view." Note that this point is hardly ever raised, and the demand for cheap, universal daycare has disappeared from the platform of US feminists, as far as I can tell. Viewpoint two takes precedence in the discussion here, which the article summarizes as follows: "that women consider money a top priority less often than men do. Many may relish the chance to care for children or parents and prefer jobs, like those in the nonprofit sector, that offer more opportunity to influence other people’s lives."

The New York Times
December 24, 2006
"Gender Pay Gap, Once Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place"
By David Leonhardt

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, women of all economic levels — poor, middle class and rich — were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the mid-’90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House — do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.

A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.

“Nothing happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late ’70s,” said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell and a leading researcher of gender and pay. “Then the ’80s stood out as a period of sharp increases in women’s pay. And it’s much less impressive after that.”

Last year, college-educated women between 36 and 45 years old, for example, earned 74.7 cents in hourly pay for every dollar that men in the same group did, according to Labor Department data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. A decade earlier, the women earned 75.7 cents.

The reasons for the stagnation are complicated and appear to include both discrimination and women’s own choices. The number of women staying home with young children has risen recently, according to the Labor Department; the increase has been sharpest among highly educated mothers, who might otherwise be earning high salaries. The pace at which women are flowing into highly paid fields also appears to have slowed.

Like so much about gender and the workplace, there are at least two ways to view these trends. One is that women, faced with most of the burden for taking care of families, are forced to choose jobs that pay less — or, in the case of stay-at-home mothers, nothing at all.

If the government offered day-care programs similar to those in other countries or men spent more time caring for family members, women would have greater opportunity to pursue whatever job they wanted, according to this view.

The other view is that women consider money a top priority less often than men do. Many may relish the chance to care for children or parents and prefer jobs, like those in the nonprofit sector, that offer more opportunity to influence other people’s lives.

Both views, economists note, could have some truth to them.

“Is equality of income what we really want?” asked Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who has written about the revolution in women’s work over the last generation. “Do we want everyone to have an equal chance to work 80 hours in their prime reproductive years? Yes, but we don’t expect them to take that chance equally often.”

Whatever role their own preferences may play in the pay gap, many women say they continue to battle subtle forms of lingering prejudice. Indeed, the pay gap between men and women who have similar qualifications and work in the same occupation — which economists say is one of the purest measures of gender equality — has barely budged since 1990.

Today, the discrimination often comes from bosses who believe they treat everyone equally, women say, but it can still create a glass ceiling that keeps them from reaching the best jobs at a company.

“I don’t think anyone would ever say I couldn’t do the job as well as a man,” said Christine Kwapnoski, a 42-year-old bakery manager at a Sam’s Club in Northern California who will make $63,000 this year, including overtime. Still, Ms. Kwapnoski said she was paid significantly less than men in similar jobs, and she has joined a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores, which owns Sam’s Club.

The lawsuit is part of a spurt of cases in recent years contending gender discrimination at large companies, including Boeing, Costco, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case against Goodyear Tire and Rubber.

At Sam’s Club, Ms. Kwapnoski said that when she was a dock supervisor, she discovered that a man she supervised was making as much as she was. She was later promoted with no raise, even though men who received such a promotion did get more money, she said.

“Basically, I was told it was none of my business, that there was nothing I could do about it,” she said.

Ms. Kwapnoski does not have a bachelor’s degree, but her allegations are typical of the recent trends in another way: the pay gap is now largest among workers earning relatively good salaries.

At Wal-Mart, the percentage of women dwindles at each successive management level. They hold almost 75 percent of department-head positions, according to the company. But only about 20 percent of store managers, who can make significantly more than $100,000, are women.

This is true even though women receive better evaluations than men on average and have longer job tenure, said Brad Seligman, the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer in the lawsuit.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Wal-Mart, said the company did not discriminate. “It’s really a leap of logic to assume that the data is a product of discrimination,” Mr. Boutrous said. “People have different interests, different priorities, different career paths” — and different levels of desire to go into management, he added.

The other companies that have been sued also say they do not discriminate.

Economists say that the recent pay trends have been overlooked because the overall pay gap, as measured by the government, continues to narrow. The average hourly pay of all female workers rose to 80.1 percent of men’s pay last year, from 77.3 percent in 2000.

But that is largely because women continue to close the qualifications gap. More women than men now graduate from college, and the number of women with decades of work experience is still growing rapidly. Within many demographic groups, though, women are no longer gaining ground.

Ms. Blau and her husband, Lawrence M. Kahn, another Cornell economist, have done some of the most detailed studies of gender and pay, comparing men and women who have the same occupation, education, experience, race and labor-union status. At the end of the late 1970s, women earned about 82 percent as much each hour as men with a similar profile. A decade later, the number had shot up to 91 percent, offering reason to wonder if women would reach parity.

But by the late ’90s, the number remained at 91 percent. Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn have not yet examined the current decade in detail, but she said other data suggested that there had been little movement.

During the 1990s boom, college-educated men received larger raises than women on average. Women have done slightly better than the men in the last few years, but not enough to make up for the late ’90s, the Economic Policy Institute analysis found.

There is no proof that discrimination is the cause of the remaining pay gap, Ms. Blau said. It is possible that the average man, brought up to view himself the main breadwinner, is more committed to his job than the average woman.

But researchers note that government efforts to reduce sex discrimination have ebbed over the period that the pay gap has stagnated. In the 1960s and ’70s, laws like Title VII and Title IX prohibited discrimination at work and in school and may have helped close the pay gap in subsequent years. There have been no similar pushes in the last couple of decades.

Women have continued to pour into high-paid professions like law, medicine and corporate management where they were once rare, but the increases seem to have slowed, noted Reeve Vanneman, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.

Medicine offers a particularly good window on these changes. Roughly 40 percent of medical school graduates are women today. Yet many of the highest paid specialties, the ones in which salaries often exceed $400,000, remain dominated by men and will be for decades to come, based on the pipeline of residents.

Only 28 percent of radiology residents in 2004-5 were women, the Association of American Medical Colleges has reported. Only 10 percent of orthopedic surgery residents were female. The specialties in which more than half of new doctors are women, like dermatology, family medicine and pediatrics, tend to pay less.

Melanie Kingsley, a 28-year-old resident at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said she had wanted to be a doctor for as long as she could recall. For a party celebrating her graduation from medical school, her mother printed up invitations with a photo of Dr. Kingsley wearing a stethoscope — when she was a toddler.

As the first doctor in her family, though, she did not have a clear idea of which specialty she would choose until she spent a summer working alongside a female dermatologist in Chicago. There, she saw that dermatologists worked with everyone from newborns to the elderly and worked on nearly every part of the body, and she was hooked.

“You get paid enough to support your family and enjoy life,” said Dr. Kingsley, a lifelong Indiana resident. “Yeah, maybe I won’t make a lot of money. But I’ll be happy with my day-to-day job, and that’s the reason I went into medicine — to help other people.” She added: “I have seen people do it for the money, and they’re not very happy.”

The gender differences among medical specialties point to another aspect of the current pay gap. In earlier decades, the size of the gap was similar among middle-class and affluent workers. At times, it was actually smaller at the top.

But the gap is now widest among highly paid workers. A woman making more than 95 percent of all other women earned the equivalent of $36 an hour last year, or about $90,000 a year for working 50 hours a week. A man making more than 95 percent of all other men, putting in the same hours, would have earned $115,000 — a difference of 28 percent.

At the very top of the income ladder, the gap is probably even larger. The official statistics do not capture the nation’s highest earners, and in many fields where pay has soared — Wall Street, hedge funds, technology — the top jobs are overwhelmingly held by men.

Arkansas ranks at bottom for working women

From the Business section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Dec. 22, this depressing article:

"State ranked worst for working women: Arkansas drops from 46th in 2004 study"
By Laurie Whalen

Arkansas ranks as the worst state for prospects related to employment, earnings and economic policy for women, according to a study released this week by The Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

In its 2006 report “The Best and Worst State Economies for Women,’’ Arkansas ranked 51st behind Louisiana and West Virginia when evaluated on eight criteria such as earnings, the gender wage gap, business ownership and poverty. The study included the District of Columbia.

The Natural State dropped from 46th in the 2004 ranking and 47th in 2002.

In an e-mailed statement, Erica Williams, a co-author of the biennial study, said slight improvements made in some of the criteria weren’t enough to keep Arkansas from falling into last place.

A drop in women’s earnings and labor force participation, a widening in the gender earning gap and a decrease in health insurance coverage helped pull the state down in the overall ranking.

When prospects are improved, it’s “going to have a positive effect on the economy,’’ she said.

The Washington-based advocacy group focuses on issues including women’s civic and political participation. The nonprofit research institute is affiliated with George Washington University.

The institute’s rankings were based on two composite indexes made up from the eight criteria. An ideal score was then created.

Williams said results showing Southern states as lacking in economic prospects for women should not come as a surprise. Since the institute began tracking the economic status of women in 1996, the South has ranked lower in comparison with other regions.

“It’s good to repeat the message that we really can do better than this,’’ Williams said. “And there’s plenty of room to move up.”

The study released Wednesday positively noted that national wages had risen in all states in real dollars since 1989, and that many states are graduating equal numbers of men and women from four-year colleges.

But women continue to earn less than their male counterparts, with the institute reporting that “at the present rate of progress, it will take 50 years for women to achieve earnings parity with men nationwide.”

In terms of annual earnings, Arkansas and Montana ranked at the bottom with their median, full-time earnings of $24,800 per year. Other low-ranking states included Mississippi, New Mexico and Wyoming.

The report said $31,800 was the typical nationwide median salary for women.

The District of Columbia had the highest median salary at $42,400. Other top-ranking states included Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Gains in women’s wages were attributed in part to labor market experience and formal education.

But Arkansas ranked at the bottom with the percentage of women with bachelor’s degrees. The state bested only West Virginia in having the lowest percentage of its female population with four-year degrees.

Higher-education degrees were attained by 17.6 percent of Arkansas women age 25 years and older, compared with 15.2 percent of the female population in West Virginia.

Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont ranked among the top states with more than 30 percent of their female population having attained a bachelor’s degree. Nationally, the average dropped to about 26.5 percent of the female population, according to the study.

Mike Leach, a public policy program director at the Southern Good Faith Fund’s Little Rock office, said making education affordable to low-income residents in Arkansas remains a challenge.

The Southern Good Faith Fund is a Pine Bluff-based organization advocating policy change on behalf of poor constituents in the Mississippi River’s delta region of Arkansas and Mississippi.

And, he added, not having the means to afford college is the main barrier in attaining a college degree.

Leach said financial aid for need-based students is only matched 70 cents to the dollar in Arkansas compared with other states that more than double the amount.

“In our view, the state is probably not making as big of an investment in creating access for all Arkansans as it could,’’ said Leach.

The institute’s report includes several recommendations, such as investing more in education at all levels, increasing the mandatory amount of contracts for women-owned businesses and encouraging employers to regularly evaluate their pay policies.

“Policies and practices such as these can ensure that women have equal opportunity with men to participate in the economy,’’ the study said. “Only in this way can the full economic potential of the nation be realized.’’

Tags: Arkansas, women

Negar Azimi (Bidoun) on homosexuality in Egypt (New York Times)

Prisoners of Sex
By Negar Azimi
New York Times Magazine, pp. 63-67, December 3, 2006

Mostafa Bakry has a knack for reinventing himself. He is an old-school Arab nationalist, newspaper editor and parliamentarian, and has managed to keep himself in

“It is a travesty,” Bakry told me not long ago when we met in the downtown Cairo office of his newspaper, Al Osboa (“The Week”). Shelves around his desk were stuffed with plaques, honorary degrees and dozens of gilt replicas of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock. He fingered fancy prayer beads as he expounded in the way one would to an adoring crowd. “The American agenda is promoting the rights of homosexuals,” he said in Arabic. “I am not against freedom of expression, but this abnormal phenomenon should not be presented as natural. Even if it has roots here, it is rejected by society. And by Islam.”

In the end, 112 parliamentarians from across the political spectrum signed onto Bakry’s motion. The gesture, however, had little effect. By the beginning of September, the film was still doing well at the box office, and no censorship was in sight. But it didn’t matter. The parliamentarian had made his point; he had raised the flag of morality, religion and public virtue.
the middle of the Egyptian political scene for almost two decades. He rails against decadence, against corruption — anything that can get the otherwise sleepy Egyptian public excited. This past July, he took on the issue of homosexuality, introducing a motion in Parliament calling for censorship of several scenes in a popular new film, “The Yacoubian Building,” and denouncing the racier parts of the movie as “spreading obscenity and debauchery.” One of the central characters in the story — a mosaic of downtown Cairo life complete with political intrigue, love triangles, the specter of extremism and more — is an affluent, dashing, Francophone newspaper editor who happens to behttp://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.bold.gif gay. He has an affair with a simple soldier from the countryside, and thus begins a tale of lust that ends in murder.



There are no gay bars in Cairo, so coffee shops (top and bottom) and the Qasr el-Nil Bridge (center) are popular meeting spots.
Top, Corbis; Bottom, Getty


The politics of homosexuality is changing fast in the Arab world. For many years, corners of the region have been known for their rich gay subcultures — even serving as secure havens for Westerners who faced prejudice in their own countries. In some visions, this is a part of the world in which men could act out their homosexual fantasies. These countries hardly had gay-liberation moments, much less movements. Rather, homosexuality tended to be an unremarkable aspect of daily life, articulated in different ways in each country, city and village in the region.

But sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular are increasingly becoming concerns of the modern Arab state. Politicians, the police, government officials and much of the press are making homosexuality an “issue”: a way to display nationalist bona fides in the face of an encroaching Western sensibility; to reject a creeping globalization that brings with it what is perceived as the worst of the international market culture; to flash religious credentials and placate growing Islamist power. In recent years, there have been arrests, crackdowns and episodes of torture. In Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, as in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — even in famously open and cosmopolitan Lebanon — the policing of homosexuality has become part of what sometimes seems like a general moral panic.

Egypt’s most famous crackdown got under way at a neon floating disco, the Queen Boat, docked on the wealthy Nile-side island of Zamalek, just steps from the famously gay-friendly Marriott Hotel. In the early-morning hours of May 11, 2001, baton-wielding police officers descended upon the boat, where men were dancing and drinking. Security officials rounded up more than 50 of them — doctors, teachers, mechanics. Those who were kept in custody became known among Egyptians as the Queen Boat 52. The detained men were beaten, bound, tortured; some were even subjected to exams to determine whether they had engaged in anal sex. In the weeks that followed, official, opposition and independent newspapers printed the names, addresses and places of work of the detained. Front pages carried the men’s photographs, not always with black bars across their eyes. The press accused the men of sexual excesses, dressing as women, devil worship, even dubious links to Israel. Bakry’s newspaper, Al Osboa, helped lead the charge.

the middle of the Egyptian political scene for almost two decades. He rails against decadence, against corruption — anything that can get the otherwise sleepy Egyptian public excited. This past July, he took on the issue of homosexuality, introducing a motion in Parliament calling for censorship of several scenes in a popular new film, “The Yacoubian Building,” and denouncing the racier parts of the movie as “spreading obscenity and debauchery.” One of the central characters in the story — a mosaic of downtown Cairo life complete with political intrigue, love triangles, the specter of extremism and more — is an affluent, dashing, Francophone newspaper editor who happens to be gay. He has an affair with a simple soldier from the countryside, and thus begins a tale of lust that ends in murder.



The Queen Boat 52 Top: Arriving in court in November 2001. They were arrested earlier that year at a disco. Above: Listening to the verdicts: 29 acquittals, 23 convictions for either the "practice of habitual debauchery," "contempt for religion" or both.

The Queen Boat was just the beginning. Agents of the Department for Protection of Morality, a sort of vice squad within the Ministry of Interior’s national police force, began monitoring suspected gay gathering spots, recruiting informants, luring people into arrest via chat sites on the Internet, tapping phones, raiding homes. Today, arrests and roundups occur throughout the country, from the Nile Delta towns of Damanhour and Tanta to Port Said along the Suez Canal and into Cairo.

The city’s central Tahrir Square is a vast plaza with awkward pedestrian islands separated by traffic, lined with a Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Arab League headquarters and the Egyptian government’s hulking bureaucratic headquarters, the Mugamma. On summer evenings, it is full of people. Men whistle at passing women, couples linger, tourists are accosted by the oddly seductive call of “You look like an Egyptian” and hawkers promote their wares — not the least of which is sex. In early July of this year, 11 men, said to be conspicuously homosexual, were picked up.

Many of the police reports on arrests of homosexuals have cited “the protection of the society’s values” as a motivating factor, adding that the arrested threatened to harm “the country’s reputation on the international level.” The country’s image is of the utmost importance for the officials responsible for these campaigns. Still, homosexual acts are not against the law in Egypt; most men caught in these roundups are charged with fujur, or the “habitual practice of debauchery.” Some countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, expressly criminalize homosexual acts. But in Egypt, the charges have increasingly involved a creative interpretation of a law introduced in 1951 to combat prostitution — drafted as a response to what was viewed as a remnant of Egypt’s colonial past. (The British introduced the licensing of brothels.)

The Queen Boat affair roughly coincided with a number of circuslike controversies in Cairo surrounding public morality: the outrage following the publication of the Syrian author Haider Haider’s novel “Banquet for Seaweed” (which incited riots at Al Azhar University in Cairo, as the book, about two Iraqi exiles in the 1970s, was interpreted as offensive to Islam); the trial of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American university professor and human rights activist accused of embezzlement, illegally accepting foreign funds and sullying Egypt’s image abroad; and the trial in 2002 of a prominent businessman who had taken 19 wives. Meanwhile the Muslim Brotherhood, which often positions itself in opposition to what it describes as a decadent, secular regime, won 17 seats in Parliament in 2000.

Public regulation of morality is an area in which the secular regime — often through its mouthpiece religious institution, Al Azhar — is in harmony with the Islamists. Al Azhar, Sunni Islam’s highest authority, was brought under direct state control by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1961. Through Al Azhar, the secular regime throws the occasional bone to the religious opposition — most often on issues of women and the family. Sometimes, avowedly secular officials and politicians even try to outdo the Islamists in this tug of war over who can win the public’s favor as the guardian of morality.

Tanta is a drab industrial town on the Nile, halfway between Cairo and the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. With a population of about 350,000, Tanta has a university and a plethora of cotton-gin and oil factories. It is probably best known for its moulid, a gathering celebrating Al-Sayyed Ahmed Al-Badawi, a 13th-century holy man of Moroccan origin credited with being the founder of the Badawiyyah Sufi order. Al Badawi died in Tanta in 1276, and each year in October, just at the end of the cotton harvest, some two million Egyptians descend upon Tanta and Al Badawi’s shrine for a week of recitations, performances, dancing and devotion.

The rest of the year Tanta is remarkably quiet. One afternoon in August, I met a young man named Hassan at a baroque, upscale hotel steps away from the shrine. Though it is difficult to speak of a gay community in Tanta (not all men who sleep with men in Egypt use the term “gay,” much less identify themselves as such), Hassan is a ringleader of sorts, a thread between generations. A youthful 37, he comes from a working-class family — his father runs an auto-parts shop — and he told me, mischievously, that he got out of military service because he is the only son among girls. For Hassan and many gay men in Tanta, the last few years have been especially hard. “First, there was Shibl’s death, then the affair of Ahmed, then Adel’s death and the arrests,” he explained.

Shibl was a friend of Hassan’s, caught with another man in the baths of the shrine — a gathering ground for many gay men at the time. In 2002 he was beaten so badly in detention that he died of cardiac arrest. Ahmed, another friend, was arrested from his home later that year, accused of having sex with two other men in his flat and “forming a group of Satan worshipers.” In prison, he was forced to strip down to his underwear, then was humiliated and beaten to the point of hemorrhaging. After his release, he lost his job as a schoolteacher. One local paper wrote, “A male teacher puts aside all principles and follows his perverted instincts, putting on women’s clothes and makeup on his face to seduce men who seek forbidden pleasures.”

Adel, a third friend of Hassan’s, was killed by an occasional lover. The ensuing investigation, not far removed from a witch hunt, resulted in many suspected homosexuals in Tanta being arrested, including Hassan. He and others arrested told me that they were held in a police interrogation room called “the refrigerator,” marked by a carpet brought in by the police that was caked in Adel’s blood. Detainees were tortured nightly for more than two weeks, from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., according to the same sources. Hassan estimates that at least 100 men were detained and tortured. Some men were forced to stand on their tiptoes for those hours; others got electric shocks to the penis and tongue; still others were beaten on the soles of their feet with a rod called a felaqa, to the point of losing consciousness.

Most men were held until they broke, agreeing to work as informants, walking the street to pick up other homosexuals and reporting in each night. “They told us Adel deserved to die,” Hassan told me. “They said they wished all gays would die.” This went on for at least a month, Hassan and others say, in a pattern of detention, torture, informing, more torture.

On my second visit to Tanta, in August, I sat down for a lunch of kapsa, a sweet Saudi rice specialty, with Hassan and Mo, a slight student of English literature at Tanta University. The discussion turned to Islam and homosexuality. Both of them considered themselves practicing Muslims. Mo has combed the Internet for signs as to whether homosexuality is at odds with Islam. He said he had browsed the popular Egyptian lay preacher Ahmed Khaled’s Web site and found nothing. But he did see that Sheik Yussuf Al-Qaradawi had called homosexuals “perverts.” Al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric generally considered a liberal, is best known for his television program “Shariah and Life” on the satellite channel Al Jazeera, and for his Web site, Islamonline.

“There is nothing clear about homosexuality in the Koran,” Hassan said. “It reads that the man who does it should be hurt. What does it mean ‘to be hurt’? In the Arabian peninsula they used a stick the size of this pencil (he raises my pencil) to punish men. It’s not like thievery or adultery. And anyway the Prophet was promised boys in heaven. Not girls.”

“I read that one should have their head cut off or be thrown from a mountain,” Mo continued.

Hassan disagreed: “There is no explicit punishment for gays in the Koran.”

Mo countered, “The problem is not the punishment, it is the scandal.”

Hassan, looking triumphant, told us that Pope Shenouda III, the head of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, had also spoken out against homosexuality. (Most famously, in 1990, he asked, “What rights are there for homosexuals?”) “It’s more complicated than you think,” Hassan said to Mo.

Countless interpretations of the story of the prophet Lot — the source of much of the commentary on homosexuality in Islam, as well as in Judaism and Christianity — have been offered. Ambiguities abound, and while there is no consensus on where Islam stands, popular and legalistic reinterpretations take liberties in selecting the bits that suit particular worldviews — whether they are liberal or intolerant. In October of last year, the Iraqi Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa against homosexuals on the Arabic-language version of his Web site. It was inexplicably removed last May (some say international outrage swayed the image-conscious cleric). And while Al-Qaradawi did call homosexuals sexual perverts, he also noted “there is disagreement” over punishment.

Perched on a hill at the end of a windy road in Helwan, an industrial town south of Cairo and once the summer romping ground for the city’s well-to-do, is the Behman Hospital. With its pruned bushes and tennis courts, Behman looks more like a country club than a psychiatric institute. Dr. Nasser Loza is the medical director there; he is also an adviser to the Ministry of Health and runs a clinic in the upscale neighborhood of Mohandiseen. I had heard through friends that Loza counsels homosexual couples, so I went looking for him.

“They come in with quite banal relationship problems,” Loza told me when we met one afternoon at the hospital. “They manage to have very normal, quiet lives despite society’s negative views about being gay.” He added that on average he sees about one new couple every two or three months. “I suppose most are high-level professionals, some are of mixed cultural backgrounds.” Loza’s patients are the people you hear less of in the din of discussion surrounding homosexuality in this part of the world. Take M., for example, a successful businessman who was among the 52 arrested on the Queen Boat. He has since moved to the States, and recently wrote me in an e-mail message: “Money gave me security. I met my partner at a dinner party. I could travel. And I didn’t have my family on my back because I had moved out. I had a normal life until this happened.”

Most often, Loza sees families. “Typically, a family comes in with their son or daughter who has just announced that they are homosexual,” Loza explained. “They want me to help. The first reaction on the part of the family is denial, and then incredible blame.” In 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, but Loza told me that “whether it is treated as a disease or not really depends on the doctor.” While a combination of counseling and antidepressants seems the norm, you still sometimes hear of the application of electroshock therapy.

L., a lesbian originally from Alexandria, is seeing a Cairo psychiatrist. Women have not been subject to the same kind of attacks that men have been in Egypt, perhaps because of their relative invisibility — an invisibility that can itself be oppressive. It can be virtually impossible to meet other gay women. For L., the brunt of the problem is her family. “I’ve been to three psychiatrists, each time taken in by my parents,” she told me. “The first two prescribed antidepressants, they told me it was a phase, that I should ‘cheer up.’ The third prescribed electroshock therapy. I never went back.”

In Cairo, L. is studying communications. She has nothing to do with her family and, through the Internet, has found a supportive partner. The weight of the stigma remains. “When a Muslim dies, there is a required 30 minutes of prayer,” she wrote to me in a recent e-mail message. “When a gay person dies, they bury him and flee.”

There is a searing scene in the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri’s 1973 novel “For Bread Alone” in which a desperate young man, having recently moved from the country to the city in colonial Morocco, sells himself to an elderly Spaniard. The scene is explicit (they have oral sex in a car), and the novel, which has been banned or caused controversy in many Arab countries, serves as a stunning condemnation of the power disparities engendered by colonialism. Symbolism like Choukri’s is common in Arabic literature and cinema, providing for what the British writer Brian Whitaker has referred to as a “reverse Orientalism,” in which sex, and specifically homosexual sex, is presented as a foreign incursion, a tool of colonial domination.

Sometimes a stigma hangs over efforts to protect homosexuals from repression or attack. Negad Al Boraei, an Egyptian attorney and human rights activist, has irritated many in the local human rights community by a number of his stances, including his willingness to accept American financing for his work. (He readily dismisses his critics as “communists” and “revolutionaries.” He was one of the first recipients in Egypt of financing from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative.) I went to Al Boraei to talk about how sexual rights fit into the broader human rights agenda.

“I was telling a friend of mine who works for Amnesty International, we have a lot of problems here — torture, violations against street children, we are full of problems,” he told me. As he spoke he gesticulated wildly with his ring-covered hands. “To come in and talk about gays and lesbians, it is nice, but it’s not the major issue. It’s like I am starving and you ask me what kind of cola I want. Well, I want to eat first. Then we can talk about cola! It’s a luxury to talk about gay rights in Egypt.”

When the raid on the Queen Boat occurred, much of the human rights community declined to take the case on, Al Boraei included. (Some activists even attacked those who met with the defendants.) Hossam Bahgat, a young Alexandrian working at the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, told me he was quietly dismissed after he wrote an article calling upon the human rights community to overcome its fears about working on the case. In the West, however, the Queen Boat became something of a cause célèbre. Amnesty International supported protests in front of the Egyptian Embassy in London. A Web site called GayEgypt.com called on Egypt’s homosexuals to wear red on the two-year anniversary of the Queen Boat raid (an invitation to be arrested, it seems), while 35 members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, asking for a stop to the anti-homosexual crusade. It was no wonder that amid this, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram al-Arabi proclaimed, “Be a pervert and Uncle Sam will approve.”

“This was framed locally as an attack from the West,” says Bahgat, who eventually collaborated with Human Rights Watch on the case and later opened his own organization, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “It was important to show that working for the rights of the detained was not a gay agenda, or a Western agenda, that this was linked to Egypt’s overall human rights record. Raising the gay banner when most sexual and other human rights are systematically violated every day is never going to get you far in this country.”

In the end, Human Rights Watch avoided laying itself open to easy attack as the bearer of an outsider’s agenda, packaging Queen Boat advocacy in the larger context of torture. Many of the arrested men were tortured, and torture is something that, at least in theory, most people agree is a bad thing. In Human Rights Watch’s 150-page report on the crackdown, references to religion, homosexual rights or anything else that could be seen or used as code for licentiousness were played down. Torture was played up, and it may very well be the first and last human rights report to cite Michel Foucault’s “History of Sexuality.” Upon release of the report in March 2004, Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch’s executive director, and Scott Long, director of the organization’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Project, met with Egypt’s public prosecutor, the assistant to the interior minister and members of the Foreign Ministry. Their effort seemed to have had some effect; although occasional arrests continue, the all-out campaign of arrest and entrapment of men that began with the Queen Boat incident came to an end. One well-connected lawyer noted that a high-ranking Ministry of Interior source told him, “It is the end of the gay cases in Egypt, because of the activities of some human rights organizations.”

When I spoke to Long about his work on the Queen Boat case and its aftermath, he reflected on his advocacy methods in a context in which human rights, and especially gay rights, are increasingly associated with Western empire-building. “Perhaps we had less publicity for the report in the United States because we avoided fetishizing beautiful brown men in Egypt being denied the right to love,” he said. “We wrote for an Egyptian audience and tried to make this intelligible in terms of the human rights issues that have been central in Egyptian campaigns. It may not have made headlines, but it seemed to make history.” Whether the effort made history or simply interrupted it remains to be seen. Long himself noted, “The fact that the crackdown came apparently out of nowhere is a reminder that the repression could revive anytime.”

The possibilities for official repression exist across the Arab world. Early one morning this past August in Saudi Arabia, the police raided a wedding party in the town of Jizan, arresting 20 men “impersonating women,” according to the newspaper Al Watan. Similarly, late last year, 26 men were arrested when a party in Ghantout, a desert region on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway in the United Arab Emirates, was raided. The press went into typical scandal mode, and images of some of the men in women’s clothing circulated on cellphones. A government spokesman was quoted in The Khaleej Times, “Because they’ve put society at risk they will be given the necessary treatment, from male hormone injections to psychological therapies.” Arrests have also taken place in Lebanon — despite its being perceived as having more liberal social mores — as well as Morocco.

In Egypt, religiosity — along with an associated emphasis on public involvement in the private sphere — continues to rise. For the 2005 campaign the Muslim Brotherhood listed beauty pageants, music videos and sexy photographs as issues needing public debate; banning female presenters (even in veils) from state-run television and expanding religious education in public schools were also on the agenda. The brotherhood won 88 seats. And in most cases, there has been complete impunity for perpetrators of attacks on gay men; individual officers responsible for attacks have been promoted or shuffled around. As recently as September, at least one entrapment case occurred in Cairo; a young man was lured via a chat site and tortured — badly beaten and subject to electroshock on his genitals — by the same office of the public morality squad that had conducted Internet-based entrapments.

In the meantime, routine scapegoating of the West, and of its real and perceived agendas in the region, seems to be reaching new highs. The Egyptian government, despite its intimate strategic relationship with the U.S., has been increasing its rhetorical assaults on what is blithely reduced to an imperial, meddling West — ostensibly to parade its nationalist credentials in the face of America’s disastrous exploits in the Middle East. (In September, Gamal Mubarak, the president’s smooth-talking, Western-educated son and heir apparent, went so far as to dismiss Western initiatives designed to foster democratization in the region at a policy conference of the ruling National Democratic Party). Blanket attacks on what is vaguely referred to as “human rights” continue; in late August, Mostafa Bakry’s newspaper, Al Osboa, assailed Hossam Bahgat’s organization, along with an NGO that works on AIDS, for defending “perverts.” The ingredients for another crackdown exist in abundance in Egypt and the region at large.

Today the Queen Boat continues to sit docked on the Nile, its name clumsily respelled “Queen Boot” in garish green neon. It is hardly the gay hangout it once was, instead catering to the very occasional budget tourist. Many dragged away by the police that evening five years ago have since left the country, and others keep a low profile, although there are signs that young people have begun cruising the Nile banks again and meeting on the Internet.

As I prepared to leave Cairo at the beginning of the fall, I received an e-mail message from M., the businessman from the Queen Boat, since relocated to the States. “I sit here, and the Americans talk about something called Islamic fascism, the Arabs go on about their values,” he wrote. “All of us, and I don’t mean gay men, I mean all of us who don’t fit the norm — democracy activists, queens, anything — it’s us who get branded as Western, fifth columnists. We pay the price.”

Negar Azimi is senior editor of Bidoun, an arts-and-culture magazine based in New York.