This paper presents the broad outlines of a research undertaken some times ago on the tracks, or, maybe more accu rately, in the move of an "anthropology of the imaginary", through a study of evolution of male homosexuality in the culture - in the Québec's one, to be specific.

Québec, in fact, as the whole occidental world, has seen, since about fifteen years, a wide movement - altogether social, political, and cultural - of homosexual liberation (or, as one says more willingly today, of gay liberation), born and grow. This movement largely contributed to modify substantially the "living" and the representations of homo sexuality in the culture (cf. ALTMAN, 1973 and 1982; PLUMMER, 1981) One of the numerous forms of this new visibility of that "love that dares not speak its name (Douglas/Wilde) has been the proliferation of publications - books, but above all periodicals, magazines, newspapers - reflecting and exploring on the "public place" quite all the facets of what one could call the gay culture - or at least subculture.

In Québec, the first important publication of that kind, at the end of the seventies (that means, around the mo ment when Michel Foucault suggested to its Parisian counter part its title - pun of "Gai Pied"), choosed to be name: "Le Berdache", from an old French word (Flaubert uses it a dozen times in his correspondence). The etymology, quite uncertain and mysterious, makes imagination going away. (Its roots habe been tracked back through Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic and even ancient Persian (cf. DÉSY, 1978). The term "berdache" - the old dictionaries (including Littré) used to give to this word the rather derogatory meaning of «catamite» («mignon entre tenu») - has passed among the concepts of contemporary an thropology (particularly Anglo-saxon (cf., e.g., JACOBS, 1968)

It has first been used by the French explorers and missionaries in North America during the 17th and 18th Centuries (e.g., Marquette, La Hontan, Lafitau; cf. DÉSY, 1978; KATZ, 1976) to designate characters, present in most of the North-amerindian cultures before White colonisation; that represents, depending of the anthropologist (not always unanimous), either some kind of symbolic transvestism - and even transsexualism (e.g., following Moll and Ellis, ANGELINO and SHEDD, 1955; MUNROE, WHITING and HALLY, 1969; FITZGERALD, 1977), either a form (usually "passive") of institutionnalised homosexua lity (DEVEREUX, 1937; FORD and BEACH, 1951; EVANS, 1978; DÉSY, 1978), but, for sure, a "social form" well integrated and even (valorisée), included in the sacred rites and in the founding myths. Thus, in many amerindian "mythes d'émergence" (Navajo, cf. HILL, 1935; hopi, cf. PARSONS, 1916; tewa, cf. SEBAG, 1971) (Nadl'e navajo), the berdaches - or, as the amerindian lan guages significatively suggest it - the "mutants" or the "man-woman"(hemameh Cheyenne) that guide the borning humanity on its road. "The berdache, writes P. Désy in the most important study about this subject published in French, constitutes the irre placeable support of a knot of social and cultural fonctions: sacred, religious, therapeutic, ritual, warrior, politic and economic fonctions. Being at the cross of all these re quests, the berdache inscribes himself in the totality of the system and his "institution" is a "complete social fact".

The choose of such a name by a Québec's gay "militant" publication, is like proposing the berdache (and the amerin dian ecology of the berdache) as an "emblem" and also as a kind of "model" of this acceptation-integration of homosexua lity in the society, claimed by the gay movement since fif teen years. "For all of us, concluded in the first number of the magazine, the author of a presentation of the berdache, this statute is a real model, and more, a local model (...)."

It is, in short, this "rapprochement" - hermeneutical "couplage", or bet - tiny indeed, but nevertheless inscribed in the culture language, that this research intended to ex plore, following a road, sometimes quite unexpected, that drove it further then the use - limited, ephemeral and, finally, quiate deceptive - that the periodical did with this "model". In fact, that use rapidly get into a dead-end - and that is easily understandable, for many reasons: among others, as the symbolic accentuation of the virility appears as one of the most prominent feature of (masculine) homo sexuality in contemporary imaginary (cf., e.g., KLEINBERG, 1978; DREUILHE, 1979), we are at the anti podes, in some way, from the classical stereotypes of the "folle efféminée" and from the also classical problematic (especially since Westphal) of the inversion (cf., e.g., MARMOR, 1965; PLUMMER, 1981) (In one of the first "open letter" adressed to the Berdache, a reader wrote that he was against the choose of that title, "against an emblem symbolysing exactly the contrary of what the move ment is supposed to represent". Others agreed with this rea der, so the Editorial teem retrenches itself behind a "symbolic disponibility" quite far from the initial proposi tion: "A name with an unknow signification may become every thing we wish. It belongs to us to give it a positive mea ning..."

However, if this reference to the amerindian berdache could appear, in many sides, as a debatable misunderstanding, the "drift" of this research allows us to see there a pre cious heuristic instrument, and suggests that it might also be, finally, some kind of "happy lapsus". Let us mention some tracks.

For example, quite a sharp polemic occured, in the pages of the Berdache, around the works (mostly unpublished) of a young anthropologist, B. Garneau (cf. nevertheless GARNEAU and LABERGE, 1978) about masculine homosexuality in Québec. Very badly received in many gay environments, and concluding, mostly, with the middle of the seventies - i.e. just before the dash of the contemporary gay movement -, this study outlines a personage of the quebecois homosexual - we'll call him, for convenience, traditional - presenting some fascinating analogies with the amerindian berdache, in a societal ecology also suggesting some significative structu ral homologies with the socio-imaginary eco-system from the amerindian cultures (and this "nonobstant" the irreductivi lity of those two kinds of socio-cultural formation).

It is, for sure, quite sad that the size of this essay does not allow us to illustrate better this "ressemblance" between the "berdachity", if we may say, of the amerindian cultures and of the homosexuality in the Québec's traditional society. Meanwhile, we must add that the exploration of this "ressemblance" has been quite difficult, for two really dif ferent reasons. In one hand, because, in a not very litte rate society, like Québec's society until a recent age - pro ducing any Proust, any Gide! - there remain few traces ("monuments" or "documents") of the homosexual living in the traditional Québec (cf., e.g., BARBEDETTE and CARASSOU, 1981, who brought to light the greatess richness comparati vely, of these traces in a society, like the French one, for example). In an other hand - and this explanation brings us back to the heart of the controversy - because the "logic" of the contemporary problematic of the "liberation" (including, as well, the "gay liberation"), because of its objectives, of its "liberatrice" claims, had the tendancy to force back the homosexual living of the Québec's traditional society into the radical "figures of oppression", hiding and also contri buting to destroy the kind of sociality "tensionnal" and or ganic (cf., e.g., MAFFESOLI, 1982; cf. also RENAUD, 1982) in which the traditional homosexual living may find, if not an "idyllic" domain, - that would, any way, depend of "fantasm" - at least a living space not without any analogy with the space offered to the berdaches by the amerindian social eco logy. (Considering that point, we may ask if the breathless of a certain liberationnist militantism, those last years, perceptible also in the gay movement, will contribute to make easier the (re)discovering and the exploration of this "berdachity" in the Québec's traditional society.)

However, and, in some sense, paradoxicaly, we must also realize that do exist, in the Québec's culture, traces of the homosexual sociality, of the berdachity in the traditional Québec - and also traces that are literaly spectacular, through the dramatic and romantic work of one of the most si gnificant contemporary Québec's writer: Michel Tremblay; his work is presented as a large imaginary fresco, and more, as a mythologic fresco of Québec's society (USMIANI, 1982). This work introduces numerous typic homosexuals and "travestis" from the Québec's traditional culture, berdaches, men-women "à cheval" (?) between sexes (La Duchesse de Langeais - Edouard from "Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal"; Sandra, Hosanna et Cuirette, etc.), but Tremblay himself always pre sents his personages as metaphors - allegories or symbols - of the Québec's society itself - for a long while "à cheval" between identities, in quest for its own, "travestie" to look like something else then itself, and particularly to its "mothers", French and American. "We are a nation that dis guised itself for many years to look like another nation, said Tremblay in an interview in 1971. We have been "travesti" for 300 years...". In an other interview, ten years later, Tremblay confirmed and specified: "In fact, when I wanted to talk about my country, a country having identity problems, I talked about it with some "travestis" (...). I've always used "travestis" as an image of an alie nate culture which tries to disguise itself in something else", Then, something is "frappant": Tremblay, in a more recent work ("Les anciennes odeurs", 1981), created in fact at the time of the referendum that asked the Québécois to pronounce themselves about their political future, presents, once again, homosexual personages; but, here, those perso nages are quite far from the one we were used to in his ear lier works. Those men belong to this "generation" who lived the "gay liberation", who, as we used to say, "assumed her homosexuality" without doing any "chichi", living it without "travestissement", banalily. We perceive, for sure, the ima ginary affinities between the quest for independance of the Québec's identity, and the homosexual "long walk" through the gay liberation presented here. But we can find again, espe cially, the "track of the berdache". In fact, if, as men tionned before, berdaches - in many amerindian myths of ori gins - guide humanity on the rising road, in the mythology of Québec's society presented in Tremblay's works, we find that berdaches, - who lived themselves the metamorphosis (cf. the nadl'e - "he changes" - Navajo) of the gay liberation - indi cate to the whole society the way of its own rising. ("any change, wrote Heidegger somewhere in a near way, arrives wi thout an escort who, first, suggested that way").

But, meanwhile, we are forced to realize that the fai lure of the souverainist project at the Referendum, the "economic crisis", a disenchentment relating to the State, the disaffection - especially from the young people - of a "national question", the new ("donne") in the Québec - Canada relations since the election of a new federal government in September 1984, the ideologic and political tears inside the Parti Québécois - all that, on the larger background (mentioned before) of a general breathless of the "militantism", creates today a new and different (conjoncture) in which the affirmation of Québec's identity, so important during the sixties and seventies, seems to be hesitating, trampling, doubting. As if the metaphore would be reversible. As if Québec, like Diane Dufresne in a recent show, wearing flaming pink, Eiffel Tower in one hand, Empire State BUilding in the other hand, - Hamlet or Lot's wife? - has the temptation to "re-travestir" itself...

We conceive the interest to go on investigating this imaginary "coming and going" between homosexual reality and culture, especially in Québec; if it might be, finally, through these personages that society seems to force back, and, at the same time, dramatically, put them on stage, that it imagines betterly the future of its present.

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