The Ethnographer’s Own Gray Behavior
I now turn my introspective observation onto my own assumed trustworthy treatment of my informants. I remember the long period I kept secret from another close informant the fact that I knew his ex-boyfriend. I met Nigel, a black engineer, at a lecture we both attended in 2003 at the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village. We developed a friendship that continues to this day (see Chapter 10). Early in our acquaintance he told me in detail about the painful separation from his boyfriend, a relationship that had lasted some two years. However, about a year later I got together with Peter, a black academic I had met a few years earlier at another Center group, SAGE (see Chapter 3), that I observed for a few months. When we first met in 1999, we developed a strong mutual interest and thereafter met regularly at the Center and other places. However, in spite of my deep empathy with Peter’s position on various issues under discussion, I felt I was unable to accommodate his expectation for a more intimate relationship, which might have eliminated the researcher-informant distance separating us. Not having seen him for a long time, I told Peter about the sites of my present observation engagement. He immediately suggested that I might be familiar with Nigel, his ex-boyfriend. I was amazed by the coincidence of my close acquaintance with these two separated lovers. I answered that I did know him but then made an unwise promise, at Peter’s emphatic request, not to tell Nigel about that discovery.
Peter was still infatuated with Nigel, and at our renewed association, he spoke endlessly about their life together and expressed his longing for his lost love. I soon realized that Peter needed my company as a link to Nigel and as a sort of pseudo-therapeutic treatment. At this stage, it was not my close friendship he wished to regain, although he went out of his way to spark my interest and often invited me to join him at meetings of various social groups. What started as part of my role as ethnographer turned into my new task of analyst of sorts. To my embarrassment, I found myself telling Peter he should forget Nigel, free himself from a hopeless love obsession, and look forward to meeting new partners for a gratifying relationship.
Nigel likewise had often related to me the story of his life with Peter and the reasons that made him give up that relationship. I believed there was no hope of Nigel resuming his relationship with Peter. In fact, he made every effort to avoid any contact with him. I was careful not to divulge to Peter any sensitive information about Nigel. Nevertheless, I deeply regretted my promise to Peter not to tell Nigel about our acquaintance. This was not the common situation of ethnographers avoiding passing any information among subjects they communicate with in the field. Instead, I felt that I was playing the part of a double agent, dividing loyalties and betraying a close friend, talking about him behind his back.
Moreover, I was worried that eventually Nigel might discover my secret anyway, and would accuse me of treachery. I was afraid of losing Nigel’s friendship and trust, particularly as he had become a major link for me to an organization that I was observing at that time. But it seemed too late to inform Nigel about my close acquaintance with Peter. I often imagined Nigel’s angry reaction and my sordid disgrace once he discovered my hidden friendship with Peter.
I wrestled with that discomfort for a few more months. But gradually the idea of maintaining the secret became easier to endure as I was meeting with Peter less frequently. The timing and the trigger of its revelation came unexpectedly, just before I exited a train that Nigel and I had taken back from a Sunday afternoon stroll through a street market. I do not remember the exact reason he mentioned Peter, but I admitted in a neutral tone that I had met him some time earlier at another group meeting. Since Nigel was staying on the train while I was getting off at the next stop, there was no time to discuss my sudden announcement. To my surprise and relief, he did not mention my sudden confession when we met a week later.
I did not delve any deeper into Nigel’s unexpected lack of interest in my acquaintance with Peter. I told him much later that I was pleased he was not concerned about my omission of that piece of information. I assume that he considered my silence part of my discreet manner of avoiding gossip about my local acquaintances. I consoled myself for my poor ethics with a comment made by the late Rachel Eytan, an Israeli writer of whom I am fond. Her major, moving novel, The Fifth Heaven, tells the story of a girl abandoned in orphanages by her divorced parents. At a public lecture, intimating the autobiographical elements in her book, she said, “The author is a traitor who trades in his family secrets.” Without prior planning I had become an invisible partner in, and betrayer of, Nigel’s and Peter’s most intimate life experiences and romantic fantasies.
Discussion
Ethnographers and their subjects, like all human beings, have secrets hidden from close relatives and friends. On occasion they also experience unexpected revelations that their interlocutors and close partners inspire. Our informants might conceal personal or other sensitive information not necessarily because of manipulative calculations or for gain of any kind. As the cases I have presented above tell us, these concealments often result from fear of damaging social relationships and losing the respect, affection, and love of significant others.
I find support for my observations in the work of scholars from various disciplines; an example is Helen Lewis, a psychologist, who in her work focused on shame and analyzed transcripts of psychotherapy sessions (1971). Lewis proposed that shame arises when there is a threat to the social bond. Every person, she argued, fears social disconnection from others. Jeff’s reluctance to expose his HIV status had its roots in his painful experience with close friends. He described his feelings of degradation and fear of being perceived “like dirt.” Jeff’s memories of the traumatic experiences of revealing his medical condition to close friends remind us of the sociologist Lynd’s terms on the circumstances of shame: “Finding oneself in a position of incongruity, not being accepted as the person one thought one was” (1958: 37).
Like many others of his generation of gay men afflicted with HIV and its later development into full-blown AIDS, Jeff was totally unprepared for the physical and social devastation that threatened to ravage his life. It was not in the category of the well-known and somewhat “legitimized” medical epidemics and life-threatening diseases, such as cancer. It was not among the embarrassing but easily treated sexually transmitted diseases that are also shared by heterosexual men and women. It was a shocking realization that one is struck with an incurable, debilitating, and stigmatizing infection. No empathy was in store for HIV/AIDS victims, in contrast to victims of cancer or other life-threatening diseases (e.g., Altman 1986; Bersani 1988).
Jeff recalled that he once visited a medical clinic for treatment of an STD (a syphilis infection). He was struck by the number of good-looking men who must have shared the symptoms. They were treated with penicillin, a simple medical procedure, making the STD seem like a sort of a flu infection. But now he felt he was all alone, treated by the media, the gay community, and even close friends as if stricken by a defiling disease. In his agony he believed that he was seen even in gay society as a sex addict who must have satisfied his erotic drive in sleazy venues and turned himself into a receptacle of tainted fluids. In common with other writers at the peak of the epidemic, Bateson and Goldsby argued that “Homosexuality, extramarital sex, and IV drugs are still stigmatized as antisocial or sinful behavior by many, and the health problems that accompany them are sometimes seen as divine punishment. Moreover, internalized homophobia and low self-esteem make individuals value their own lives and health less, leave them with less hope for the future” (1994: 128).
During the early years of the epidemic many patients developed AIDS-associated Kaposi’s sarcoma, with ugly skin lesions.