CARACTERIZACIÒN DE LA INSTITUCIÓN EDUCATIVA

When I was still developing a blueprint of how I would proceed, I read Meanings of Sex Between Men, a study conducted by the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations for the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health. The study focussed on the HIV/AIDS information needs of so-called “MSM”:

men who have sex with men who do not identify as gay or who do not identify with the gay community (Bartos et al., 1994: 2)

The study interested me because of the constraints imposed upon it by the ostensible object under investigation. First, the research subjects were difficult to identify, a difficulty that arose not merely for the researchers but [potentially] for the research subjects themselves:

Sexual identity is not a major issue for MSM. Sexuality is not a key part of their sense of personal identity, which is based instead on other personal relationships (e.g. family, career etc.). Some men actively refuse a gay sexual identity, for others it is simply irrelevant. MSM rarely think of themselves as bisexual, although if they have to choose a sexual identity, some are prepared to be called bisexual. (Bartos et al., 1994: 4)

Second, the men in question proved difficult to contact; a nation-wide search, excluding “over-researched” Sydney, recruited relatively few interviewees. Questionnaires were eschewed:

Any questionnaire is inevitably predicated on a value and knowledge laden perspective and position. Questionnaires though, make it difficult to go beyond or even discard that

perspective in the course of the interview. Questionnaires determine the parameters within which replies can be made. (Bartos et al., 1994: 19)

Attention was given instead to extended in-depth interviews:

The interviews normally took between one and two hours, although some went for up to three hours. [...] The role of the interviewer was to enable the men to tell their stories in their own ways and to acknowledge and value their experiences. (Bartos et al., 1994: 19)

The interviews were characterised by the interviewees’ engagement with

narrative content at the level of specific concrete phenomena, which sometimes carried with it a metonymic force:

[T]he men being interviewed were asked not to generalise about their sexual activities. Rather, they were asked to focus on very particular sexual incidents. Minute details were seen as very important: What was the man wearing? Was he standing on your left or your right? Were his jeans a zip fly or were there buttons?” (Bartos et al., 1994: 19)

By avoiding the general, by focussing on sites of differentiation, the so-called “minute details”, what emerged was a plenitude of difference, and it was a difference that rightly problematised the prevailing hegemonic same[s]. This excited me.

There were, however, aspects of the project that perturbed. I noted that one of the interviewees, “OB, 28 years old, Unemployed”, was quoted several times. When considered separately, each quotation, separated by up to forty pages, seemed coherent and plausible, believable as a direct transcription of his speech. Yet when I compared the quotations alongside each other, it became obvious that this was not the case:

OB, 28 years old, Unemployed : “I met Peter 4 years ago through mutual friends. We were at a party. I expected to pick up a girl I liked and go home with her. This didn’t happen. Instead I stayed the night and ended up in bed with Peter. I’d never thought about sex with a man before that night. Our relationship has continued on from that night. I also don’t think I’m gay. I’m just in love with Peter. We’re in a relationship together. That’s all.” (Bartos et al., 1994: 29)

OB, 28 years old, Unemployed : “We fuck each other, taking turns. It’s always unsafe. Our relationship is totally monogamous. I’ve never done it with another man or woman in the time we have been together, and can’t imagine doing it with anyone else while we’re together. I love him. I don’t need to have sex with other people. I’m not tempted. I also don’t think I’m gay. I’m just in love with Peter. We’re in a relationship together. That’s all.” (Bartos et al., 1994: 53)

OB, 28 years old, Unemployed : “I’d never thought about sex with a man before that night. It sort of just happened totally out of the blue. We have great sex. Maybe once or twice a day. We fuck each other, taking turns. It’s always unsafe. I’m just in love with Peter. We’re in a relationship together. That’s all.” (Bartos et al., 1994: 55)

OB, 28 years old, Unemployed : “I’d never thought about sex with a man before that night. It sort of just happened totally out of the blue. I liked him and I liked sex together. Our relationship has continued on from that night. I didn’t go through a crisis or panic thinking I was gay. I simply moved in and I’m still there. We have great sex. Maybe once or twice a day. We fuck each other, taking turns. It’s always unsafe. Our relationship is totally monogamous. I’ve never done it with another man or woman in the time we have been together, and can’t imagine doing it with anyone else while we’re together.” (Bartos et al., 1994: 68)

None of these passages, it now seemed, literally quoted OB at all. While all of the interviewees may have been encouraged “to tell their stories in their own ways” at the time of the interview this was not how OB’s story was now being re- presented. What had he said? Something like the following?

I met Peter 4 years ago through mutual friends. We were at a party. I expected to pick up a girl I liked and go home with her. This didn’t happen. Instead I stayed the night and ended up in bed with Peter. I’d never thought about sex with a man before that night. It sort of just happened totally out of the blue. I liked him and I liked sex together. Our relationship has continued on from that night. I didn’t go through a crisis or panic thinking I was gay. I simply moved in and I’m still there. We have great sex. Maybe once or twice a day. We fuck each other, taking turns. It’s always unsafe. Our relationship is totally monogamous. I’ve never done it with another man or woman in the time we have been together, and can’t imagine doing it with anyone else while we’re together. I love him. I don’t need to have sex with other people. I’m not tempted. I also don’t think I’m gay. I’m just in love with Peter. We’re in a relationship together. That’s all.

Possibly.

My reconstruction demonstrated the virtue of narrative logic [at least], but I had no way of telling what further material, if any, was missing. Had there been interruptive interviewer probes that had since been removed? Had OB’s speech flowed as evenly in time as its distribution on the page suggested, unhindered by hesitations, false starts, repetitions, coughs, pauses for thought, reflective silences, about-faces, phatic ruptures and, for the purposes of the research, irrelevance (that concern with literary form again)? For me the answer mattered. It wasn’t enough that I was reminded of Barthes’ sarcasm:

We talk, a tape recording is made, diligent secretaries listen to our words to refine, transcribe, and punctuate them, producing a first draft that we can tidy up afresh before it goes on to publication, the book, eternity. (Barthes, 1985: 3)

I was niggled by an apparently marginal detail:

We fuck each other, taking turns. It’s always unsafe. Our relationship is totally

monogamous. I’ve never done it with another man or woman in the time we have been together, and can’t imagine doing it with anyone else while we’re together. (Bartos et al., 1994: 53)

The term “unsafe” here seems to mean “unprotected”, that is, without a condom. OB, who had no “gay community attachment”, probably picked up the term from its currency somewhere else, maybe from the researcher who interviewed him:

In this study we define ‘unsafe sex’ as ‘unprotected anal or vaginal intercourse, insertive or receptive’. Unless stated otherwise, ‘unsafe sex’ will refer to unprotected anal intercourse between men. (Bartos et al., 1994: 2)

Wherever it came from, at a first reading, what OB seems to have accepted without question, and this was common enough in the early 1990s, is the

conventional use of the term “unsafe” as a synonym for “unprotected”, even though the situation he described—two men, both HIV negative, in a “totally monogamous” relationship—is one where “unprotected” sex would not be “unsafe” at all. After declaring “our” relationship to be “totally monogamous” OB goes on to state, as if clarifying what he meant by “totally monogamous”, that he

has never done it with another man or woman in the time that he and Peter have been together. This is what niggled: total monogamy being what it is, there should be no need for OB to offer this quasi-tautological clarification. The effect of it is to underscore a potentially “unsafe” slippage on his part between “our” and “I” in which “our” “totally monogamous” relationship actually refers to OB’s behaviour only: “I’ve never done it with another”. Did OB doubt the “totally monogamous” status of his relationship with Peter, after all? If so, when he stated that their sex was always “unsafe” was he indeed speaking exactly and not, as it would initially seem, conventionally? Because of the undisclosed extent of the editorial interventions, it wasn’t possible to tell. I had no way of ascertaining what OB had actually said (it’s a measure of the report’s overall success that I came so much to care). If the excerpts of the interview transcripts had been printed in their entirety, with all elisions and other editorial changes noted, then my knowledge would’ve been more usefully complete. As it was, I couldn’t tell if OB was exact in calling their unprotected sex “unsafe”. And I still can’t.

There were other reservations I had with the study, but the main reason I held back from basing my own research on its methodology was more fundamental. These researchers, like so many others I’d read, were skilled social scientists; I was not. I was intellectually engaged and moved by their work—it felt near to my interests and concerns—but emulating their methodology, even in an adapted version, was another matter. I work in and with performance. At the time, I’d been doing so for twenty years: directing, composing, sometimes even

performing. I needed something nearer to what I knew. And then, while reading this same report, I unexpectedly found it:

We should not expect to find men articulating the nature of the experience of sex as time out of time in rational discourse or in response to researchers’ questions. It is, by nature, inchoate. But we can find evidence for the plausibility of such explanations in what cannot be said, at the points where rational discourse fails. (Bartos et al., 1994: 55)

It was when I read this passage in relation to others, such as that describing questions at the level of “minute detail”—what I came to think of as the “buttons or a zip” phenomenon—that a connection was made, especially the references to “what cannot be said” and to “the points where rational discourse fails”. I was reminded of something unlike anything in this study of “MSM”, unlike anything else I’d been reading. And being reminded of it challenged and disturbed me. I was reminded of a film.