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My instructor for my cultural anthropology class presented a section on sexuality and discussed how peoples sexuality is determined, in large part, by the culture they grew up in. The book that we are reading to compliment the curriculum, The Gebusi, discusses how younger males will go off into the forest with older males after a night of drinking and laughing to become initiated through the sexual act of fellatio. The initiate ingests the elders life-force (semen) and is thus given the power to become a man, get married and settle into a monogamous relationship.

Does this make Gebusi men gay, homosexual, queer, etc.? Not at all. Gebusi don’t identify themselves as gay or bisexual, etc. The idea of classifying their sexual experiences to define them as one certain person would be foreign. It’s through western influences of biology and psychology that we have given risen to classifying people based on their sexuality. Did you know that the word homosexual wasn’t even first used until 1869? From Wikipedia:

The first known appearance of homosexual in print is found in an 1869 German pamphlet by the Austrian-born novelist Karl-Maria Kertbeny, published anonymously.[22] The prevalence of the concept owes much to the work of the German psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing and his 1886 work Psychopathia Sexualis.[23] As such, the current use of the term has its roots in the broader 19th century tradition of personality taxonomy. These continue to influence the development of the modern concept of sexual orientation, gaining associations with romantic love and identity in addition to its original, exclusively sexual meaning.

Here is a statement the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association put together after President George W. Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage as a threat to civilization:

“The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.”

Pretty awesome, huh?