The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies THE PERFECT PATH Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia Tom Boellstorff J n a 1997 ad for Ciputra Hotels that appeared in the Indonesian national airline’s in-flight magazine, a smiling Balinese dancer in bejeweled “traditional” garb stands juxtaposed to glittering hotel facades. The ad proclaims that “Indonesia is also home to Asia’s newest hotel concept. . . . While tradition thrives in Indo- nesia, the world’s most modern concepts are equally at home” (fig. 1). Presumably, one of these “modern concepts” is the “Western” male business traveler, who will feel “at home” under the domestic attentions of the female staff.’ It hardly takes a subversive reading to see that the ad constructs Indo- nesia as a hybrid of tradition, gendered female, and modernity, gendered male. This binarism has a long history, extending from colonialism to modernization theory. Many non-“Western” intellectuals have addressed its symbolic violence, including the man many consider Indonesia’s greatest living author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. His novel Footsteps, which opens in 1901, is set in the late colonial period but speaks by analogy to the Indonesia of the 1970s and 1980s, when it was written. The protagonist, Minke, has just come from Surabaya to the capital, known informally as Betawi. Alone and poor but on his way to medical school and a “modern” career, Minke frames his arrival as a change of time as well as place: Into the universe of Betawi I go-into the universe of the twentieth century. And, yes, to you too, nineteenth century-farewell! . . . People say only the modern man gets ahead in these times. In his hands lies the fate of humankind. You reject modernity? You will be the plaything of all those forces of the world operating outside and around you. I am a modern person. . . . And modernity brings the loneliness of orphaned humanity, cursed to free itself from unnecessary ties of custom, blood-even the land, and if need be, from others of its kind.2 GLQ 5:4 pp. 475-510 Copyright 0 1999 by Duke University Press Published by Duke University Press from


GLO: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
follow the same path.5 One theme of this essay is that in LGQ studies a more serious engagement with postcoloniality as a category of analysis might improve our understanding of sexualities outside the "West."6 In this essay I focus on people outside the "West" who use the terms gay, lesbian, and bisexual, or close variants of them, rather than on the "indigenous" homosexuali ties and transgenderisms that have hitherto been the almost exclusive concern of the "ethnocartography" of homosexuality.7 (In the case of Indonesia, the subjectivities I refer to are gay and lesbi.) While attention to lesbian, gay, and bisexual subjectivities outside the "West" is certainly increasing, Kath Weston's 1993 observation that "in the international arena, the 'salvage anthropology' of indigenous homosexualities remains largely insulated from important new theoretical work on postcolonial relations" continues to be distressingly valid in 1999.8 This provincialism originates in the perceived incompatibility between postcoloniality, on the one hand, and persistent narratives of a "global movement" within LGQ studies, on the other. While such narratives are politically salutaryindeed, a strategic essentialism may be warranted in some contexts, given the dominance of "development" as a rubric for conceptualizing global change9they have limited LGQ studies' awareness of the ethnocentrism of many of its assumptions about what constitutes activism, visibility, politics, social movements, and even identity. In response, I view this essay as representing a category of scholarship that might be termed "postcolonial LGQ studies." I am struck by the predictable manner in which interpretations of non-"Western" gay and lesbian subjectivities fall into two reductionisms in LGQ studies. In the first, these subjectivities are said to be "just like" lesbian and gay subjectivities in a homogenized "West." They represent the transcendental gay or lesbian subject, characterized by a supposed essential sameness that has been there all along, hidden under a veneer of exotic cultural difference. (Such an understanding recalls Bhabha's analysis of colonial mimicry, "the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of dijfference that is almost the same, but not quite," and is represented in texts like The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement.)'() I want to point out how teleologies like this converge with Minke's "footsteps" to modernity, critiqued in Toer's novel.
The second reductionism, the opposite of the first, assumes that these gay men and lesbians suffer from false consciousness and are traitors to their "traditional" subjectivities, victims of (and, ultimately, collaborators with) a global gay imperialism. They represent the McDonalds-ized, inauthentic gay or lesbian subject, alienated from its indigenous Gist. From this perspective, these subjectivities have an essential dzflerence, hidden under the veneer of the terms lesbian and guy. So the "footsteps" of traveling LGQ theorists go in circles around the "sameness" or "difference" of non-"Western" gay and lesbian people with respect to gay and lesbian people elsewhere. The issue of sameness and difference extends to concerns about postcolonial subjectivity beyond LGQ studies; it is in fact one of the animating concerns of anthropology in the twentieth century. My work has been motivated in part by a search for a way of talking about sameness and difference that avoids these reductionisms. Such a way might point toward less teleological paths of theory and identity in LGQ studies.
Considering the importance of postcoloniality in this way has led me to recall that in the last twenty years there has appeared, outside LGQ studies, a sophisticated body of literature exploring Indonesia from a postcolonial perspective." Yet the scholars who have contributed to it have paid scant attention to Zesbi and guy subjectivities, even though most U.S.-based Indonesianists of the past fifteen years were taught Indonesian by D6d6 Oetomo, a Cornell-trained anthropologist who has written on guy identities in Indonesia. 12 In this essay I use ethnographic material from Indonesia to interrogate the complementary lacunae in Indonesian studies and LGQ studies in search of a third framing of guy and Zesbi subjectivities. Historical context plays a role as well. Both Footsteps and Imprints employ a path metaphor either to critique or to celebrate globalization as developmental and homogenizing. In 1990, however, an Indonesian sociologist discovered in a Jakarta archive a remarkable manuscript written by a man named Sucipto, who had had sex only with men and had participated in a community of like-minded men in 1920s colonial Java. Sucipto titled his writings The Per$ect Path. The relationship between his "perfect path" and contemporary Zesbi and guy subjectivities cannot be reduced to a Procrustean modernist path.
The contingent appropriation of concepts of homosexuality makes for subjectivities that are irreducible to those in the "West," even if the terms are similar. Guy and Zesbi are not just "gay" and "lesbian" with a foreign accent.
An important caveat is that in this essay I focus on guy men.'" In some sense "gay" and "lesbian" moved to Indonesia as one concept, "gayandlesbian"; thus homosexuality has implied heterosociality in some circumstances.l4 But despite an impressive record of cogendered community, the "guy archipelago" I describe is decidedly gendered male. 15 The case study I employ is the "mystery" of guy men's marriages to women. In the larger project from which this essay is derived I explore the specificities of Zesbi subjectivity in Indonesia from historical and contemporary perspectives, building on existing analyses of Indonesian women's same-sex and transgendered subjectivities.16

Sameness versus Difference, local versus Global: Reconceiving Two Binarisms
I develop my argument for a postcolonial perspective via two binarisms that permeate most discussions of LGQ identities outside the "West": sameness versus difference and local versus global. In regard to the vexed binarism of sameness and difference, the issue is not the world's becoming more the same or more different under globalization (neither homogenization nor heterogenization per se) but the transformation of the very yardsticks by which one decides whether something is the same or different in the first place, that is, the reconfiguration of the grid of similitude and difference. In The Order of Things Michel Foucault characterizes shifts in Western European thought in terms of conceptualizations of sameness and difference.17 What analytic purchase might be gained by positing, under some circumstances at least, a postcolonial "order of things" in which relationships between same and other were characterized not as boundaries transgressed but as boundaries blurred, not as borders crossed but as borderlands inhabited, not as spheres adjoined but as archipelagoes intertwined?'* This approach might help theorize the inequalities of globalization (oppression does not require distinct boundaries), and the fact that globalization is not rendering the state irrelevant, in a way that still accounts for the fact that guy and lesbi Indonesians find their subjectivities authentic.
The second issue is the revamping of the local-global binarism. Building from emic cultural logics of a guy archipelago, I argue that gay and lesbi are translocal subjectivities for which the local-global binarism is conceptually and methodologically insufficient. The isomorphism between difference and distance is broken; sameness is measured not in terms of concentric spheres of decreasing familiarity but archipelagically, so that someone thousands of miles away might be "closer" than someone next door. This phenomenon is not a cosmopolitanism by which national subjects (usually urban elites) imagine themselves as part of a community that transcends the nation, sharing structures of feeling and patterns of migration above local (usually poorer) communities.'" Nor is it a diaspora in which gay or lesbian selves disperse from an originary homeland, or a hybridity in which two prior unities turn difference into sameness via an "implicit politics of heterosexuality."20 Gay and lesbi Indonesians construct themselves as part of a community that, while it includes non-Indonesians in complex ways, transforms rhetorics of nationalism and locality as well. The dialectic between immanence and transcendence sets these subjectivities apart from cosmopolitan, diasporic, or hybrid ones.

8 1
The production of translocality in gay and lesbi subjectivities presents a problem for some theories of globalization, for it is not predicated on the movement of people; most lesbi and guy Indonesians are working-class, do not speak English, have never traveled abroad, and have no contact with non-Indonesian lesbians and gay men.21 A majority live in the towns and even the households where they grew up. Nevertheless, most see not only their selves but their social places as figurations of a simultaneously national and global community. To explore how translocal subjectivities could arise without the movement of people, my research needed to be translocal as well. I conduct ethnography in three primary urban sites -Surabaya (East Java), Denpasar/Kuta (Bali), and Ujung Pandang (South Su1awesi)-but in a profound sense I do not regard my work as comparative. I am certainly interested in differences and similarities between my sites, but I also view my work as taking place in one site, Indonesia.22 While extralocal affiliations are common throughout Indonesia, impacted not only by nationalism and capitalism but by world religions like Islam and Christianity, gay and lesbi subjectivities exhibit translocality to a heightened degree. Significantly, there are local places and organizations for lesbi women and gay men and a national network but no intermediate Java-wide or Bali-wide organizations. Throughout the remainder of this essay I show why, while gay and lesbi Indonesians are aware of their ethnicities, the idea of a specifically Javanese or Balinese guy or lesbi self is currently unthinkable: there is a meaningful incompatibility between ethnicity and gay or lesbi subjectivity. Anthropologists looking in Surabaya for gay Javanese people, orang gay Jawa, would fail. Instead, they would find people who, in the context of their sexual subjectivities, thought of themselves as orang gay Indonesia.

Gay Worlds and Archipelagoes
In the early 1980s some Indonesians began to take the "Western" terms Lesbian and gay and transform them until they saw them as authentically Indonesian.
Through everyday practices of spatial formation, pleasure, romance, bodily comportment, social imagination, and language (including the use of a slang involving not only lexical substitutions but unique inflections), they have articulated a community that they call the dunia gay, or "gay world."23 For men, this world encompasses a range of places and activities, from strolling in air-conditioned shopping malls to hanging out in parks or by the side of a road at night, forging quasi-private sites in public space called tempat ngeber, or "flaunting places." That the gay (and occasionally lesbi) Indonesians who frequent such sites see

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them as transformed is illustrated by a contrast drawn by an informant in Bali. We were talking about the importance of friendship when he said, "[Guy men] might become friends in places like the temput ngeber in the town square, but if we meet in a temput umum [public place] like a movie theater or supermarket, we pretend we don't know each other." In terms of semiotics, bodily comportment, and community, he no longer experiences the town square as a public place.24 This man's emphasis on tempat ngeber as a place to make friends is significant. Under general conditions, when one is rarely far from the watchful eye of family, workplace, or school, temput ngeber are sites where subjectivities are forged. The people who hang out there are only secondarily looking for sex; indeed, many come night after night with long-term lovers or a group of friends. Groups of two or three quietly conversing alternate with crowds of five to thirty engaged in "campy" [ngondhek] joking, gossip, and rapid-fire retorts, using slang extensively. Gay men and lesbi women define themselves in terms of "desiring the same," unlike transgenders, who see themselves as having the soul of one gender in the body of another. Temput ngeber, then, are literal subject positions, forming both local communities and the persons who inhabit them.
Some tempat ngeber comprise areas where "open" guy men are known to congregate (often under a streetlight), other areas where those who are more "closed" gather, and still others where sexual partners may be found regardless of selfidentification. People's movements between these areas-on a given night but also in a general pattern over a period of weeks or months-not only reflect their subjectivities but reconstitute the relationships that form these subjectivities. Since temput ngeber usually exist in public spaces and at night, access to them is limited for women, including lesbi women. But they and guy men also form subject positions in homes, salons, food stalls, and church groups; on volleyball teams; and in shopping malls or discos. Some guy men and lesbi women form organizations with varying degrees of formality and even publish magazines.25 It is widely felt that these groups, as well as the less formal subject positions of parks and homes, are linked in a national network. Gay men and lesbi women assume that guy and lesbi communities elsewhere in Indonesia share their subjectivities, differing only in the degree to which their members can be "open" and can interact with transgenders. Some Zesbi and guy Indonesians experience communities outside their own directly through migration as they search for work (or attempt to escape from prying family members). In addition, many cities (particularly Solo, Yogyakarta, Denpasar, Malang, and Surabaya) put on performance events that attract guy men and Zesbi from distant cities for two or three nights of revelry. Rural guy men say that these events give them a rare chance to move outside the limited world of pen pals and build a friendship network.
While many rural and some urban guy men and Zesbi women are isolated from other guy men and Zesbi women (due to the fear of discovery or to their not knowing where others can be found), most have a network of five to twenty friends who play a constant role in their lives. An all-guy volleyball team practices every afternoon on a crowded athletics field; a line of men waits to play, but many sit on the sidelines and exchange news. Agung, a guy man, lives with his parents in their boardinghouse. It has twelve rooms on the upper floor; over a period of two years five are rented to guy men, two to guy couples, and one to a Zesbi woman. In the hallway between the rooms, conversations on long hot nights give way to meetings and the idea of an organization, until one day the mother decides that she dislikes Agung's crowd, and one by one they move elsewhere. A Zesbi woman whose parents own a small restaurant finds temporary work for another Zesbi woman in a nearby shop and advises her on a recent breakup.
While the quotidian details of life come and go, Zesbi or guy Indonesians who move from one city to another expect to find people who share their subjectivities and suspect where they may be found. For the larger number who do not move from one city to another, there remains a sense that these everyday experiences are part of an imagined community of guy and Zesbi subjectivity extending across Indonesia.
Moreover, guy and Zesbi Indonesians think that non-Indonesian lesbians and gay men share a set of beliefs, desires, and practices (even though only a few have known such people personally). At the end of interviews I always asked my informants if they had any questions. Some wanted to know if gay bars really existed or if I had met Leonard0 DiCaprio, but just as often they responded politely that "I feel I already know everything about your life."26 Guy men and Zesbi women usually assume that these familiar others are "the same" in terms of same-sex desire and "different" in terms of social acceptance and political rights.
(But the meanings of "desire" and "acceptance" may themselves be conflicted, as

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
The guy world is a domain of everyday subjectivity and practice that parallels the regular world, but when the places of the gay world are linked in an imagined national or transnational community, distant but present, the metaphor shifts from world to archipelago. One group in Surabaya names itself (and its magazine, usually recognized as the national magazine) GAYa Nusantara, an intentional polysemy in which each term has a dual valence. Gayu is the Indonesian for "style," but the unusual capitalization highlights the term's similarity to guy. Nusanturu means "archipelago" and is also a nationalist term for "Indonesia." Because adjectives follow the nouns they modify in Indonesian, while they usually precede them in English, the term GAYa Nusuntura parses in a fourfold manner as "archipelago style," "Indonesia style,'' "gay Indonesia," and "gay archipelago." While this term is by no means used by or even known to all Indonesians who identify as lesbi or gay, it manifests a common way of translocalizing these subjectivities "archipelago-style," at the intersection of local, national, and transnational rhetorics of selfhood, sexuality, and community. In other words, the local does not form the ontological ground for these subjectivities, and Zesbi and guy Indonesians do not see themselves in a position of simple exteriority or interiority vis-8-vis non-Indonesian gay and lesbian communities. State ideology frames Indonesia as an archipelago of ethnicities; lesbi and gay Indonesians co-opt this image by conceptualizing the sites of Zesbi and guy identities as "islands," which at a higher resolution are reframed as a single island in a transnational archipelago of gay and lesbian community. While the Javacentric Indonesian state provides a familiar example of archipelagic inequality, archipelagoes are nevertheless composed of discontinuous sites, none of them subsumed by the others: they are not bounded domains with a necessary center and periphery. How are w e to understand subjectivities that connect and confound traditional levels of analysis-and, arguably, lived experience in the "West" -namely, the local, regional, national, and international? Figure 2 is the symbol for GAYa Dewata, a group in Bali that is housed in an AIDS organization. GAYa comes from GAYa Nusantara; dewata is the Indonesian for "gods": the Balinese refer to their island as puluu dewatu, or "island of the gods." The symbol for this group is an AIDS ribbon inverted and turned around so that it looks like a ceremonial Balinese male headdress, as illustrated by the painting in figure 3. In this image we see discourses of local, national, and international provenance intertwined with AIDS development discourse and with the state ideology that requires every province to have a distinct character.27 This translocal subjectivity cannot be explained solely in terms of local versus global;

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Published by Duke University Press the parallels reveal not a common path but a logic of reconfiguration-on local and translocal levels-that does not originate in the "West." This reconfiguration is best understood as archipelagic in form. Indonesian transgenders frequently ask me, "Are there people like me in America?" Lesbi women and gay men never ask this question, because their subjectivities already assume the copresence of analogues beyond the local. What we see in Indonesia is not movement toward a uniform global sexual culture; the "foreign" elements are not only localized but translocalized, and this process is far too

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Published by Duke University Press determined to be reduced to a n aggregate aftereffect of localization. Indonesians do not identify as guy, then imagine themselves as part of a national community, then construct it as part of a transnational community. The process proceeds on all levels at once, in a historically specific manner, sometimes through the explicit metaphor of a guy archipelago. Postcolonial lesbians and gay men are not "the same" as "Western" lesbians and gay men, and they do not live across a chasm of absolute difference.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Published by Duke University Press The archipelago concept, in the "unity in diversity" form in which it is articulated through the practices and statements of Zesbi and guy Indonesians, is not a timeless cultural archetype but is quintessentially modern, a key structuring principle of the nation-building project. Its reformulation has been a crucial means by which the state has struggled to reinterpret the denizens of Alfred Russel Wallace's colonial-era "Malay Archipelago" as citizens of a postcolonial archipelago.28 The wawasun nwanturu or "archipelago concept" dates from the early period of nationalism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it gained new force in 1957 in the context of an international dispute over maritime boundaries.29 In 1973 the Indonesian government decreed that the archipelago concept "gives life to national development in all its aspects-political, social, and cultural."30 Public culture in Indonesia is replete with the image and ethos of the archipelago.
Diversity subsumed in unity is a hallmark of the state's rhetoric of cultural citizenship; it is predicated on a distinction between "culture" and "politics" that frames ethnicity [suku] as a matter of religion and the arts, while the people [bungsa] are linked to politics, commerce, and, above all, modernity.31 Fifty-four years after national independence, this Indonesian subjectivity is as fully imagined as any ethnicity, with its own language, ritual practices, ideologies, and symbolic sites. That it is complexly imbricated with the state does not invalidate its everyday authenticity for many Indonesians. It has not supplanted ethnicity but interacts with it in an additive manner, since the valorization of pluralism is central to the state's self-presentation as an archipelagic container of diversity. Gay or Zesbi Indonesians are not necessarily more nationalist than other citizens. At the same time, state rhetorics of the archipelago are not deployed in a utilitarian manner by presocial guy and Zesbi subjects; a man hanging out in Texas does not deploy the archipelago concept instrumentally, although it does facilitate his imagining that place and his self as linked to an imagined gay Texas elsewhere. The state stands as an inadvertent idiom for guy subjectivity, influencing the daily practices by which the guy archipelago is enacted, constituted, and maintained in all its marginality.
The state itself, however, pays little attention to these subjectivities. There When I first heard the word guy, it was in the fifth or sixth grade [c. 19851, on the island of Ambon, where I grew up, near New Guinea. It was there that I first heard about lesbi. Earlier, you know-guy wasn't around yet. But Lesbi was already in women's magazines. I read lots of those magazines, because Mom was a regular subscriber. Mom and I loved reading the articles on sexual deviants. I was always effeminate, and one day she said I was lesbi, because she didn't know gay; the term wasn't public back then.:34 But eventually I learned the term g u y as well. That was also from a magazine. There was some story about historic English royalty . . . Richard someone. When I saw that, I thought, "There are others like me.":35 While Darta's prior identification as lesbi raises interesting questions about the disjunctural character of postcolonial sexualities, the element of his story that I want to highlight is the role played by mass media. Most Indonesians do not learn of the terms lesbi and guy through non-Indonesian lesbians and gay men or through lesbi and g u y magazines, which they usually access only after identifying as lesbi or guy. Most learn of these terms through imported programs-movies like Cruising, The Wedding Banquet, and M y Best Friend's Wedding; television shows like Melrose Place-as well as through pop psychology advice columns and gossip columns on the sexual lives of celebrities.:j" Many informants recall a moment of recognition when "I knew that was me" or "I knew I was not the only one." Some "Western" lesbians and gay men may find such a moment of recognition familiar. However, the subjectivities that these Indonesians recognize (or misrecognize):57 in mass media cannot be reduced to dominant "Western" models of sexual identity. Nor does a preexisting internal state of desire find its social label at this moment. Instead, the subject and the archipelagic frame encompassing its desires are mutually constructed.
To situate the moment of recognition or construction, it is once again necessary to bring in the postcolonial nation-state. The Indonesian state has become aware that its mass media policies have crossed a threshold beyond which they encourage not only nationalism but translocal subjectivities that threaten to spin beyond state control. Television stations in Indonesia, for example, rely heavily on imported programming (each imports about seven thousand shows a year), and they frequently dub these shows into Indonesian. In 1996, sensing an opportunity to further its language policy, the parliament, with Suharto's tacit approval, passed a draft law requiring that all foreign shows be dubbed.-38 An unusual debate between Suharto, the parliament, the army, and other pressure groups ensued, and in July 1997, after months of controversy, Suharto refused to sign the law-the first time in Indonesian history that such a constitutionally questionable act had taken place.39 When the dust cleared in December 1997, the law had been changed to its exact opposite: all dubbing of foreign television shows was forbidden; only subtitles were permitted.40 The government has justified this about-face in terms of cultural contamination and the family. As one apologist explained: "Dubbing can . . . ruin the self-image of family members as a result of adopting foreign values that are 'Indonesianized.' . . . whenever Indonesians view television, films, or other broadcasts where the original language has been changed into our national language, those Indonesians will think that the performances in those media constitute a part of themselves. As if the culture behind those performances were also the culture of our people."41 At the intersection of postcoloniality and globalization, the ability of Sharon Stone or Jim Carrey to speak Indonesian is no longer a welcome opportunity to build language skills and foster the prestige of Indonesian but instead threatens Indonesians' ability to differentiate themselves from the outside.42 The fear is that the citizen will be alienated, as in Toer's novel, from "others of its kind." How might the emergence of lesbi and gay subjectivities, on ostensibly personal and social levels, parallel this controversy? How might we think of them in terms of "dubbing culture," an embodiment of subjectivities that, from a modernist perspective, appear disjunctural and inauthentic? How might dubbing culture be less like a path and more like an archipelago?

The Mystery of Gay Marriage
Despite the power of mass media, their influence is neither direct nor determining. Their transformative effects, and those of the archipelago concept, are nowhere more apparent than in the "mystery" of gay men's marriages to women.
Walking along the dark riverbank in Texas one night toward a group of shadows leaning against a railing, I met Andy and four of his friends. Andy identified as gay, explaining that his boyfriend of ten years was married with two children.
When I asked if the boyfriend should get divorced, he stared in shock: "Of course not. He needs descendants and a wife. I want to get married in five years -1 already have a girlfriend. You mean you won't marry as long as you live?" When I nodded, the other men confronted me in astonishment: "How could you

GLa: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
not want to get married? You'll be lonely when you get old! Everyone must have descendants." In this story, gay men not only implicate me in their guy archipelago but also discuss a central concern of their lives, marriage. Most guy Indonesians marry and have children and see these actions as consistent with their subjectivities. Most also assume that gay men in the "West" marry women.43 While in Indonesia, I always placed on my desk a picture of my partner that shows him standing with a female colleague. Most guy-identified men would point out this picture and say, "His wife is taller than he is!" My explanation that she was a friend and that neither my partner nor I wanted to marry a woman would be met with disbelief and pity. Many "Westerners" have reciprocated with their own misrecognition when assuming, as I once did, that guy identities are incompatible with marriage. They have failed to understand that not only the guy world but the guy self is archipelagic. What is distinctive about these identities vis-8vis "n~~-mal" Indonesian sexuality is not same-sex sex (it is usually taken for granted that both men and women will engage in it, given the chance) but love, abiding romantic interest in the same gender.
The gay self is not internally homogeneous and integrated; instead, it is composed of multiple subjectivities constituted in, rather than ontologically anterior to, social relations. It is an additive and "dividual" self, consistent with selves identified by many scholars of Southeast Asia and Melanesia but, just as important, embodying state rhetorics of ethnonational identity.44 Guy and Zesbi Indonesians construct and are constructed by an overdetermined archipelagic idiom.
Thus dominant "Western" notions of egosyntonic, unitary identity have been reconfigured in the Indonesian context: this homosexual self desires to marry.
Gay persons are self-reflexive but not self-congruent. Could they become poster children for the ultimate postmodern subject? The mystery is more complex.
Ikbal was a friend of Andy; Ikbal's wife of five years lived in a nearby village with their child, while he cohabited in Surabaya with a male lover, Dodi.
Hand in hand with Dodi at Exus almost every night, Ikbal frequently lectured other guy men on the obligation to marry and the joys it brought. It was a point of pride to him that his wife and parents "knew about him" and that he and Dodi had married cousins so they would never be separated. One day Ikbal insisted that I come to the village to meet his wife. Once there, however, we would stay in a nearby town with his parents until Sunday; he would end up spending only two hours with his wife before we had to return to Surabaya. En route to the meeting Ikbal told me about the months of sexual frustration he and his wife had exper-

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Published by Duke University Press GAY MEN, MARRIAGE, INDONESIA 491 ienced: they had been able to consummate their marriage only by admitting Dodi to their bed, where he lay alongside Ikbal and, as Ikbal's wife sobbed, stimulated him so that penetration could take place. On this Sunday, when he could delay his visit with his wife no longer, Ikbal warned me to be extra macho: "NOW is the time to begin playacting." Apparently his family's knowledge of him was more fractured than I had suspected. As our little minibus, adrift in a green flowing sea of rice paddies, approached the village and a tense afternoon of silent squabbles and awkward smiles, Ikbal looked out the dusty window and almost whispered: "These parts of my life cannot be unified.,,45 Theoretical physicists may believe in God's creation; social constructionists may believe that they were born gay or lesbian. The mystery of guy men's marriages to women is that most guy men evince-simultaneously, within a single subjectivity-an archipelagic self to which marriage is not only compatible but pleasurable and a self for which it stymies a desire to integrate one's spheres of life into a single narrative trajectory.& Most guy men want to marry, but they also scheme how to delay or avoid it and how to maintain guy friendships and sex partners once married. This is a mystery not only to the "external," non-Indonesian observer but also to the men themselves; many of them, like Ikbal, experience it as a contradiction. One clue to it lies in the origins of the imperative to marry itself. While marriage is a powerful norm throughout Indonesia, the particular form of this imperative that guy men experience certainly does not stem from a primordial localism: I have found strikingly little regional, religious, or ethnic variation concerning guy men's ideologies of marriage. In some regions, like Java and South Sulawesi, it is not historically expected that all persons will wed and procreate.47 Additionally, what limited sources we have suggest that from the 1920s to the 1960s Indonesian men with same-sex subjectivities assumed that their subjectivities, like those of gay men and lesbians in the contemporary "West," precluded marriage to an opposite-sex spouse. What, then, is the origin of the imperative to marry?
A key element of Indonesian state ideology, apart from the archipelago concept, is the u r n kekeluurguan, or "family principle,', which holds that the family is the fundamental unit of the nation.4 Crucially, this is not the extended family but the nuclear family, whose ubiquitous smiles illuminate television ads and government posters: husband, wife, and two children, with a car, a home with smooth white tile floors, a television set, and other paraphernalia of the new middle class. It is this "public domesticity" that the state equates with citizen subjectivity and summons into being through a range of development practices.49 4 9 2

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
Children are necessary for continuing the nation and for supporting their elders in their old age. The state's ideal family converges with the rhetoric of globalization.
While a considerable body of work has pointed out the gender inequalities of the new international division of labor, less attention has been paid to its foundation in the naturalization of the heterosexual couple as the basic unit of the postcolonial nation. More effectively than Henry Ford's fabled management of his workers' lives ever could, the heterosexualization of the labor force constitutes the domains of public and private, locates the family as the unit of consumption, and naturalizes gender inequalities. Thus heterosexuality provides a critical suture between capitalist ideologies of production and nationalist ideologies of the nuclear, middle-class family as metonym for the nation. It is a moral economy linking economic production and citizenship. As constituted by these discourses, the unmarried self is an incomplete economic and national subject.50 Albeit rarely, guy men sometimes directly critique the conjunction of class, nation, and the imperative to marry, as the following examples from a manifesto published in Jakarta in 1997 show. In figure 4 we see "a poor hetero family that does not follow Family Planning." Utensils and toys are strewn about a dirt floor; a mother, weighed down by an infant, screams over a gas stove, while the father is incapacitated in bed by the fighting of the other four children. One child is urinating on the floor; curtains hang precariously from unhinged shutters.
The parents have "create[d] not heaven but a 'hell' on earth. How far can this husband and wife guarantee that their children will become successful people later on?" By contrast, figures 5 and 6 show "a lesbi couple who are professionals" and "can live together comfortably" and "a young guy couple who, besides being happy, also can enjoy life optimally." The author notes that the lesbi couple can live "with . . . fewer problems on average than hetero families" and asks, if the guy couple "were each married in the hetero manner, could it be guaranteed that they would live as comfortably as shown above? Only if they were descended from wealth." What is shown in figures 5 and 6 are beautifully coiffed hair, upholstered furniture, clean clothes, smooth white tile floors, television sets (with images of women performing traditional dances that might have been taken from the Ciputra Hotels ad in figure l ) , automobiles, two servants (men for the gay couple, women for the lesbians), gardens being watered, and the calm aura of leisure. The message in the Indonesian context is clear: lesbi and guy couples can "outfamily" the family. But what constitutes the family is not challenged: it remains the modern middle-class, professional household. The hegemony is resisted, but only in its own language and in terms of its own consumerist logic.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Published by Duke University Press With this consumerist ethic comes a modernist, narrative self, defined in terms of autobiography. While far from universal, the notion of the self as something constructed is hardly new.54 What is at issue in the Indonesian context is the conjunction of a fashioned self with a specific middle-class consumerism. It is not a fantasy of the sultan or the super-rich cosmopolitan who selects at will from the world's bounty. It is a circumscribed personhood-as-career in which, given limited resources, one negotiates and budgets one's life trajectory within a marketplace logic that guides the crafting of choices. The self becomes the self's profession: this middle-class subjectivity is a story that the self tells to itself about itself, rather than a story passed down primarily through kinship, ethnic, or religious background, as the stories of the lower and upper Indonesian classes historically were.55 Like middle-class subjectivities, guy and lesbi subjectivities are not passed down through tradition; they become their own stories, and the telling of those stories becomes a problem. A palette of possible lives spreads out Figure 6. "A young gay couple who, besides being happy, also can enjoy life optimally. If they were each married in the hetero manner, could it be guaranteed that they would live as comfortably as shown above? Only if they were descended from wealth." before the subject, whose only prohibition is not to choose. One self-consumes, struggling to forge one's self-story. Like M. C. Escher's image of two disembodied hands gripping pens, conjuring each other into existence on a drawing pad, the self and the self's story form a loop of personhood in which social others are secondary. As Escher's loop breaks down without the pens with which to draw, so the commodity forms the conduit by which the middle-class self writes its story. In this sense, the guy person is self-congruent. Is this the same old liberal, bourgeois subject that has received such scholarly attention?% The mystery is more complex.
My goal is not to adjudicate between apparently contradictory notions of guy personhood, the archipelagic and multiple (where marriage to women is not a problem) or the consumerist and congruent (where marriage to women is a problem).57 Noting that both the archipelago concept and the family principle emerge in the shadow of the state, I wish to hold them in tension, as a mystery, because it is precisely in such a multiply mediated contact zone that guy subjectivities exist.% Neither concept of personhood is exclusive to Indonesia; at issue

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Published by Duke University Press are the circumstances of their imbrication. In the context of a narrativized self that is also multiple, a guy self can be a married, procreating self. When a guy man turns to his lover in bed and tells him to marry, he is not confused about who he "really" is, nor is he internalizing homophobia or denying reality. He is expressing and perpetuating an identity best thought of as archipelagic (rather than cosmopolitan, diasporic, or hybrid). While I find the gender politics of this scenario disturbing, particularly for women like Ikbal's wife who have little power in their marriages, it is important to recognize the situated rationality at play in the production of these new inequalities.
The crucial point is that homosexuality (and sexuality more generally) is globalized not as a monolithic domain but as a multiplicity of beliefs and practices, elements of which can move independently of each other or not move at all.59 In the case of gay and Zesbi, the notion of homosexual identity has moved, but other aspects of the dominant "Western" discourse of homosexuality have not.
Foucault's genealogy of homosexuality in the "West" locates the intersection of power and knowledge at the confession.60 Identity reveals and renders intelligible an interior, private self but is not authentic until exteriorized to an interlocutor who interprets and acknowledges this confession. Only then is the person "out of the closet," even in the remarkable case of the "intralocutor" operative in "coming out to yourself." Many theorists have shown how this model construes homosexual identity as a constant, iterative process of articulation and reception, an incitement to discourse that contributed to the "reverse discourse" of the lesbian and gay rights movement.61 But when the terms lesbian and guy moved to Indonesia, the conjunction of sexuality and confession neither preceded nor followed it. As a result, the ontological status of Zesbi and guy subjectivities does not hinge on disclosure to spheres of home, workplace, or God. Guy men and Zesbi do not "come out of the closet" but speak of being "opened" [terbuh] or "shut" [tertutup]. Construed not in terms of moving from one place to another but in terms of opening oneself, these subjectivities are additive rather than substitutive; opening them does not neces- the history of homosexual identities in the "West."62 In early-twentieth-century New York, for instance, the term coming out, derived from the notion of a debutante ball, implied coming out to a select community, not to all spheres of life.
Furthermore, many homosexually identified people married and did not see their doing so as incongruous. Nonetheless, I would caution against a teleological reading of Indonesians as followers in these footsteps and against a structuralist reading of contemporary Indonesia and historical New York as presenting a mutual set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Such interpretations beg the question of how sameness and difference are measured in the first place. Contemporary lesbi and gay subjectivities diverge in important respects from earlier homosexual identities in the "West," not least because they imagine themselves situated in an actual transnational archipelago of established lesbian and gay movements. As Ikbal's story reveals, moreover, the epistemology of the gay world coexists mysteriously with a narrative self exhibiting a tropism toward unity. The "Westerner" of Sucipto's imagination did not have same-sex desires prior to this encounter. Even after learning that a colonial "Westerner" can have these desires, Sucipto does not identify with him; he sees him as interested only in commodified sex, incapable of the love that distinguishes the desire Sucipto has shared with other Javanese men. Sucipto sees his homosexuality in the 1920s as a local, Javanese phenomenon; he also sees it as incompatible with marriage and has discouraged his Javanese friends from marrying. Living at the high point of Dutch colonialism, he does not imagine himself as part of a national or transnational community, but in some ways his subjectivity is closer to "West-4 9 8

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
ern" gay or lesbian subjectivity than to contemporary Indonesian guy subjectivity, since normative guy Indonesians marry and normative gay "Westerners" do not. It is not coincidental that the sociologist who discovered Sucipto's text published it as Path of My L f e , which seemed "more fitting with its character as an autobiography," rather than as The Perfect Path. From his perspective, Sucipto's story could represent not a perfect path but only the path of his life. From this standpoint, self-identity is personal and Sucipto's text an autobiography -particular, not ~niversal.6~ Clearly, a theory of globalization that holds that things become more similar as time marches on is insufficient. Contemporary Zesbi and guy subjectivities are not just the evolutionary end points of Sucipto's subjectivity. They represent a dubbing culture, the production of translocality, the reterritorialization of "Western" discourses of homosexuality in the context of already existing notions of same-sex desire.65

Conclusion
The term "post-colonial" is not merely descriptive of "this" society rather than "that," or of "then" and "now." It re-reads "colonization" as part of an essentially transnational and transcultural "global" processand it produces a decentered, diasporic or "global" rewriting of earlier, nation-centered imperial grand narratives. Its theoretical value therefore lies precisely in its refusal of this "here" and "there," "then" and "now," "home" and "abroad" perspective.
-Stuart Hall, "The Question of Cultural Identity," 247 In this essay I have taken in earnest Hall's interpretation of postcoloniality as a flexible, provocative problematic. In doing so, I have produced the beginnings of a decentered, archipelagic rewriting of what might otherwise be interpreted as imprints on a perfect path: the emergence of Zesbi and guy subjectivities in Indonesia. Refusing the perspectives of sameness-difference and local-global, I hope that my analysis opens avenues of inquiry beyond the Indonesian case.
In reference to nationalism, Chatterjee asks: "If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain 'modular' forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. . . . Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized."66 For Chatterjee, postcoloniality provides a rough starting point from which to deconstruct this dilemma. Such a framework, I argue, proves worthwhile in the context of g a y and Zesbi subjectivities as well. Transposing Chatterjee's question to sexuality, I would answer that there is a vast, archipelagic space in which guy and lesbi Indonesians might imagine new subjectivities and communities, despite conditions of inequality, oppression, and contradiction. When some Indonesians began to identify as lesbi and guy, they articulated subjectivities that apparently rejected local traditions and lay outside Indonesian history. But in fact these Indonesians have reconfigured local, national, and transnational discourses in a way that challenges the modernist single trajectory for lesbian and gay identity. Were Sucipto and Minke to meet a contemporary lesbi or guy Indonesian, they would have difficulty understanding a postcolonial subjectivity that has transformed the boundaries by which one decides who is "the same." The specter of LGQ identities as either homogenized or fractured beyond recuperation by the forces of globalization must give way to a more nuanced postcolonial and translocal perspective, informed by a rubric of postcolonial LGQ studies. There is no perfect path.
To protect their confidentiality, I have changed the names, as well as details of locations and personal histories, of all Indonesians mentioned in this essay except D6dC Oetomo. My research in Indonesia in 1992Indonesia in , 1993Indonesia in , 1995Indonesia in , and 1997 I have also come to realize that the neglect of gay and lesbi subjectivities in Indonesian studies stems less from a putative homophobia than from the equivalencies drawn in the "Western" academy between disciplines, methodologies, and discursive constitutions of the "field" as a unit of analysis. Historically, anthropologists in these islands have tended to study "ethnicities," the Javanese or Balinese or Minangkabau, rather than "Indonesians." Given the limitations of space, I do not discuss conflicts in these communities in terms of gender, class, region, and so on (see, e.g., Murray, "Let Them Take Ecstasy"; Blackwood, "Tombois in West Sumatra"; Boellstorff, "Gay Archipelago"; and Oetomo, "Gender and Sexual Orientation in Indonesia"). Instead, I focus on processual formations of imagined lesbi and gay communities (i.e., the conditions of possibility for imagining intercommunity conflict in the first place).
For a broader discussion of the "privatization" of public spaces by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered communities see Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, eds., Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Seattle: Bay, 1997); and Bell and Valentine, Mapping Desire.
The distinction between "organizations" and other spaces is less clear than it might seem. Organizations tend to be small (three to ten members), and many cease to exist after three or four years. Those that survive for longer periods have usually obtained international funding, but since the primary impetus of such funding is HIV/AIDS prevention, and since international HIV/AIDS prevention discourse commonly ignores lesbians, lesbi groups are rarely able to access such funding, so they find it particularly difficult to sustain themselves. Only a few specifically lesbi magazines have ever existed: one, GAYa LEStari, was published four times between February and August 1994 as a supplement to the magazine GAYa Nusantara. A specifically lesbi magazine, MitraS, published three issues beginning in December 1997, but it is currently on hiatus.
During colonial times it was hardly unusual for Indies "natives" to have greater knowledge of the "West" than "Westerners" had of them. This imbalance persists today and represents a strong thread of continuity in the postcolonial context. At issue is the relationship that this knowledge bears to the guy or lesbi self.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Published by Duke University Press

34.
For "public" Darta used the term umum, the same term used by my Balinese informant to distinguish tempat umum [public places] from tempat ngeber.

35.
That Darta and Darta's mother knew of lesbi first was probably due to the wide publicity given the marriage of two women in Jakarta in 1981. See

47.
About two-thirds of my informants learned of these terms through mass media.
Almost all the rest learned of them from friends or by wandering into a tempat ngeber. Of course, there is a high probability (which I have documented in some instances) that the people who provided them with the information had themselves