Urban Aborigines and the Divine Androgyne: The Primitivist Homomythopoetics of Gay Sex in Early 1980s California

Two books were published in the early 1980s on the West Coast approaching leathersex and body modification practices from the lens of primitivist homomythopoesis: the first, The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha, by Christopher Larkin, proposed leathersex as ecstatic androgynous communion, while the second, The Urban Aboriginals, by Geoff Mains, presented itself as an ethnography of the leather subculture.. Proposing the Androgyne, which he understood as a figure who had “combined both anima/yin and animus/yangi within a single bodyconsciousness in a life ideal of wholeness and balance,” on a page illustrated with a “hermaphroditic statue” from the Ivory Coast and a 9th century depiction of Shiva as half-man half-woman from Orissa, India; Larkin operated in a temporal landscape in which the Androgyne was both the ur-force of repressed eternal nature and also the “future, the next step in human evolution.” In contrast, Mains’ understanding of the political and social meaning of leathersex was similarly conditioned by the primitive as a state of alternative social reality but proceeded far more soberly, along the lines of self-ethnography.

This paper argues that these texts were rooted in a temporality I call primitivist homomythopoetics: the creation of a new global standard white gay male identity constructed, poetized, out of myths about Others considered ‘primitive,’ stuck backwards in time. The broader study from which this paper is excerpted argues that primitivist homomythopoetics was an essential part of white gay men’s identity formation process. This paper focuses on primitivist homomythopoetics’ service to gay liberationists in their opposition to Cartesian dualism, and in tying non-reproductive sex to the reproduction of the social. This provided gay men with a social role: in deploying these practices, white gay men articulated themselves as links between an imagined past utopia and the political future.