ABSTRACT
Implicitly framing much of the literature is an old-fashioned empiricist project allied to a hard-won understanding of the sexual politics that continue to target lesbian and gay male relationships in Anglo-European societies. In short there has been a kind of butterfly collecting approach in which there have been attempts to classify various forms of homosociality and gender variance into universal types or categories, such as mixed and transgenderal, age or transgenerational and egalitarian homosexuality. In particular, the potential for the realization of ‘true love’ and the affirmation of a feminine-defined, transgenderal identity was related in gay imaginations to their symbolic proximity to America. Gay-men relations in Sabah, Malaysia and/or Saudi Arabia while similarly constructed in terms of callboy transactional forms, retain, at least in gay representations, the clear distinction between masculine-identified and feminine-identified sexual acts which marks them out as the transgenderal or female partner.
