So the answer really is that it is incredibly complex and there are many pitfalls when trying to show a historical overview on the topic.Special Edition Newsletter National American Indian and Alaska Native ATTC Sometimes they didn't dress as women, and sometimes they took on roles that were neither designated for males or females. However, it turns out that it is much more complex than that. The standard view of these individuals was that they were homosexual males who dressed as women and took on the role of women.
I use that term this once just to make it known that it is the term that was applied to Plains Indians historically). With those tribes, you had individuals called berdache (which is a historical term, that many now don't use simply because it is culturally insensitive. Among the Plains Indians for example, it wasn't so clear cut. We also have to be careful to not impose our own views of sexuality on other cultures. For instance, the term "two-spirit." It is a modern term, and often it is applied to all tribes however, to do so ignores the vast differences between tribes, and often, we don't have historical support for such individuals in many tribes. We also have to be careful to not retroject current views into the past. We can't be sure if this was authentic views among different tribes, or if this was the view that occurred post European contact, as various tribes were trying to assimilate, and were adopting western views. That is often the case, as we see many examples in which homosexuality is demonized among Native Americans. This translation comes from the Catholic priests who set out to record the language, and their biases shined through. If we look up term that meant homosexual, which was winkte, in their dictionary, it is translated as hermaphrodite a plant or animal with both male and female reproductive parts. And even when we have clear terminology that refers to homosexuality or the like, we have to take it with a grain of salt.Ī good example of this is with the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. Often though, the only answer we have is, we don't know. The answer is going to vary widely based on tribes. This is what some Native American tribes had there’s a 1992 book called Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture that discusses it. Trans people are the nearest contemporary equivalent, but various cultures recognized and accepted this role before hormone treatments and sexual reassignment surgery were invented. IIRC, boys above a certain age were expected to fellate older boys (their culture had, shall we say, an idea that there was some kind of law of conservation of sperm) above a certain age, the young men did it to one another after a man married and had his first child, he was expected to have sex exclusively with his wife.Ī two-spirit (called “berdache” in older literature, but contemporary Native Americans consider this an offensive term) is someone who is physically male but takes on a female or androgynous gender role. Sex was a thing that people higher up the social hierarchy did to people lower down.Īge-graded sex is what a certain tribe in New Guinea did. A man might prefer to have relations with a man rather than a woman, but he wouldn’t think of himself and his male lover to share a “sexuality”. Adult male citizens screwed women, adolescent males, and slaves of both sexes. Role-specific sexual relations is what the ancient Greeks did. The word “homosexual” was only coined in the late 19th century. Homosexuality in the way most of us understand it-where, for example, a man who has always identified as male and fulfills all the expectations of the male gender role has sex only with other people who identify as male, in the same way that most men have sex with women-is a modern thing. What I learned from a gay-studies prof back in college is that anthropologically, there are four ways that cultures have organized same-sex sexual relationships (at least among men-my prof was better-versed in gay studies than lesbian studies):