The Arizona Republic - December 29, 2003
Judy Nichols

In Native American and other indigenous societies, the issue is not so clear.

That makes it difficult for HIV/AIDS workers to advocate safe sex because men who don't label themselves "gay" don't connect with the education materials distributed in the White world.

Part of the difference is terminology and part is attitude, said Wesley Thomas, a Navajo who is an assistant professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of Indiana. He is also co-editor of the book Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality.

Sex, like male/female, defines biology. Gender, man/woman or masculine/feminine define social roles, Thomas said.

Native Americans are flexible about letting people choose gender roles not necessarily based on their sexual identity, Thomas said.

"The Western perspective is a binary gender class," Thomas said. "You're either a man or a woman. It's so inflexible, it's static. Native Americans have more flexibility."

In this world of movable gender lines, the label "gay" for men who have sex with men doesn't always fit.

If a man has sex with a male who presents himself to the world as a female, he may not call himself gay.

Dressing the part

For a party on National Coming Out Day in October, Mattee Jim dressed in the long-sleeved velvet top and tiered skirt worn by Navajo women on special occasions.

Jim, 31, was born male, but it didn't seem to fit.

"In preschool, I knew who I was," Jim said. "I played with the girls."

At the party, Jim did a pantomime to a song in Navajo, camping it up as a wife done wrong by her husband, bringing the audience to howls of laughter.

Today, friends use the female pronoun to describe Jim.

Her hair is long and flows down her back or is tied up in a knot.

But she hasn't changed her sex surgically. She's transgender, male but presenting herself to the world as a woman.

"It's all labels," Jim said. "I'm first and foremost Navajo. I'm just me."

Jim said she grew up with a lot of physical, verbal, emotional and mental abuse from her father, who couldn't accept her the way she was.

By 12, she said, she was an alcoholic, and for years she had risky sex and still worries about someday testing positive for HIV.

Reaction mixed

Jim said Navajos react to her in two ways.

"Those who are Westernized are not accepting," she said. "Those who are more traditional, the older ones, see things differently. I can do men's work, like haul wood or haul water. But I can do women's work, too, like sew, cook, all the feminine things except have babies.

"Before, that was accepted. It was part of the culture."

Jim has been sober for six years and is a health educator for the Navajo Aids Network, a non-profit prevention group with offices in Gallup, N.M., and Chinle.

She goes to the bars, setting up information tables, passing out condoms and information.

She said men who sleep with transgenders like her often don't call themselves gay.

Sometimes they're married. And they're having sex with someone who presents themselves as a woman.

"These men are at great risk for getting infected with HIV and can carry HIV home to their wives," Jim said.

"It's hard to work with them. They don't identify as gay. They're not visibly out."

Tribes accepting

Thomas, who is working on a book on Navajo gender identities, said that historically many tribes accepted and revered hermaphrodites, people with ambiguous or both male and female sex organs.

"Some placed them on pedestals, most had important roles within the tribe," Thomas said. "What they gave to the community took precedence over who they were sleeping with.

"In American society, we're more obsessed with who people are sleeping with than what they bring to the community."

There were also people whose sex was not in dispute, but who took on both gender roles.

"Each tribe had tribal names for people who occupied these roles," Thomas said. "The roles were created in the creation story, and identities evolved out of tribal religions. So many of these people functioned in religious roles, as medicine men or medicine women.

"They perpetuated native religion, and in some tribes they were asexual."

Things changed with modern medicine and the arrival of missionaries.

"The appearance of Christianity and Western education eliminated the flexibility," Thomas said. "The goal was to make native people think like Westerners. It gave permission to eliminate these people, and many were killed in the name of the Bible, for the sake of the cross."

Thomas said some tribes sheltered people, but it meant they disappeared as role models for young people searching for their identity.

Modern medicine eventually was able to "fix" hermaphrodites, usually eliminating male organs so the child would be raised as a female. But many of those children have switched genders as adults, saying their parents chose the wrong sex for them.

Christopher James, 19, and his partner, Myrtis DuBois, 34, love to shock.

Sometimes they dress up in drag, with full makeup and wigs, and go to the Denny's in Gallup to have tea and watch people stare at them.

"They usually just look at us and smile," James said.

Or they drive the two hours to Albuquerque to go dancing.

"People here are more reclusive," James said. "They're not really out. There's no place for anybody to go. A lot of people are not out with their family."

DuBois said he was called names in high school, but was also taught about Navajo acceptance of gender bending.

"Since the beginning of time, the Navajo looked on it with a special dignity," he said.

James and DuBois have been together about six months, and both get tested regularly because of past risky behavior.

Still, they don't practice safe sex 100 percent of the time.

"A lot of people are not getting tested because they don't want to know the truth," DuBois said. "They're spreading the disease before they know they have it."

Natives didn't fit in

In the 1950s and '60s, with the relocation of Native Americans to urban areas, many people sought out urban gay and lesbian communities.

"But those communities are very much sexualized," Thomas said.

Native people, feeling they didn't fit in, searched for a place somewhere between the reservation and the urban gay community.

Today, they use a new term for themselves: two-spirits.

"The term cannot be translated into any Native language," Thomas said.

Reach the reporter at judy.nichols@arizonarepublic.com.
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