Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities

Among the most persistent European myths about Africa, explain the editors of this anthology, is that homosexuality is "absent or incidental" in African societies. Since black Africans were felt to be the most primitive of people--the closest to nature--it followed that they must be the most heterosexual, their "sexual energies and outlets devoted exclusively to their 'natural' purpose: biological reproduction." That the field work of early anthropologists didn't always support this assumption merely led researchers to suppress their findings, or to fail to inquire too closely of subjects who were reluctant, in any case, to discuss their sexual lives with outsiders. The contributors to this volume argue convincingly that even native denials of homosexuality are often politically motivated (the sexual values of the West having permeated most of these cultures), and should be regarded as skeptically as the accounts of Western anthropologists, who in most cases have not seriously investigated same-sex patterns, "failing to report what they do observe, and discounting what they report." In the essays collected here, dating from the colonial period to the present and covering the major regions of black Africa, evidence of same-sex marriages, cross-dressing, role reversal, and premarital peer homosexuality challenges the myth and calls for further study. --Regina Marler