The Genesis of Boy-Wives and Female Husbands

In 1974, in Montréal, I was one of the founders of the Sociologist Gay Caucus.2 I was the one not doing research on homosexuality. [...] Will did not press, but he planted the notion in both me and the African text that role stratifications by age and gender were kinds of status, reinforcing the difference between each and what we called “egalitarian roles.” The last has been interpreted as suggesting status equals across the boards, whereas what was definitional for us was the absence of a role hierarchy. [...] There was never any belief that the “versatile” took the bottom role half the time, the top the other half—and some underestimation of intimacies not involving genitals, though I think the history of discourse has downplayed sex to talk about the less frightening (to social respectability) phenomena of “gender,” so I have no regrets about my earlier goal of analyzing sex/sexualities.) Along the wa. [...] Only two chapters of the book were told from the perspective of Africans with intimate familiarity with living same-sex desires in Africa: Nii Ajen’s casual survey of expatriates and my own interview of the young Kikuyu who chose the pseudonym of Kamau. [...] The publisher of the book wanted a stand-alone title that did not highlight it as being a part of a series, especially a later part, so “African Homosexualities” was retitled Boy-Wives and Female Husbands—a catchier © 2021 State University of New York Press, Albany The Genesis of Boy-Wives and Female Husbands xxiii title, I guess, though she also burdened us with a hardcover that infuriated me by.