Takatāpui (Homosexuality)

This one was exciting for me. In western cultures homosexuality has been deeply repressed since time immemorial, so when dealing with a historical setting the best you’ll get is a story about a gay person being burned at the stake or something. Most likely it simply won’t exist.

In traditional Maori culture homosexuality was acceptable. I need to do more reading about this to figure out the nuances, but I suspect based on my reading, and knowledge of the culture that it was carried on mostly premaritally or simultaneously with a heterosexual marriage.

That’s my intuition based on the Maori attitude toward sexuality in general, which was relaxed by Western standards. A relaxed sexual attitude will tend to allow sexuality to develop as it might have in nature, which research now shows is quite nuanced.

First, it would not be binary. There is a lingering belief in the west that a person is either gay, straight, or perhaps bisexual (but often bisexual people are thought of as confused). The reality is that there is a spectrum between absolutely gay and absolutely straight. And further, that spectrum is only a part of a person’s preferences which include overall sexual appetite, and demographic preferences like relative age.

Second, there would be no gay identity. This one is tough to explain, so bear with me. There is so much emphasis on homosexuality in western culture that we feel pressure to make a decision about it. It’s either good or bad, and we’re either gay or not. We feel we have to choose sides. Men especially grow up with guilt and doubt if perhaps they experimented with a partner of the same sex as a child or teen; they agonize over what it “means,” and whether they are “really” gay and just don’t know it.

All those considerations evaporate in a culture that doesn’t pressure people either way. Think about a 13 year old boy who tries boxing for a few months. He thinks it’s fun, but a little repetitive, and he doesn’t much like being punched in the face, so he stops. He doesn’t spend the rest of his life agonizing over whether it was immoral, or whether he’s “really” a boxer at heart and just doesn’t realize it. It’s a non-issue. He tried it, it was fun, he stopped. If he wants to try it again, he can. If he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t have to. Sexuality can be the same way in the right culture.

On the other hand, we have the intense family bonds of the Whanau (extended family). This was the basic social unit of the Maori. Marriages were generally arranged to strengthen bonds between Maori groups. So in a culture that doesn’t force people to form their identity around their sexuality, and that values family very highly, I would expect to see gay men and women who also very genuinely want a family. In this case, that wouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

From Wikipedia:

Same-sex relationships and activities appear to have been acceptable amongst pre-European Māori. Some stories, for example that of Tutanekei and Tiki, seem to be about same-sex couples. A British missionary, Richard Davis, found homosexual relationships between men to be a familiar part of Maori life, and although homosexual relationships between women have not been well documented, they were certainly not condemned. In modern New Zealand, a common label adopted by LGBT Māori is Takatāpui, a term that has been revived from pre-European times and popularised since Homosexual Law Reform in 1986. The term roughly translates into English as intimate partner of the same sex.