It was a beautiful December day in the central Pacific – checkered skies in the morning had given way to a gloriously hot, clear afternoon. I peddled my bicycle down the dirt road towards the little loaner house the Peace Corps had so kindly negotiated for on my behalf. All I could think of was a quick rinse in cold well water and a nap. As I walked to the house, I heard that gruff voice call out the words that I had grown so used to hearing:

Ti na maroro teutana. We need to talk. It was my host mother and, as usual, she wasn’t happy with her newest, yet eldest, child.

“Yes?” I asked her. “How are you today, Twabeneti?” My host father, Teuriri, was with her, not looking at me. It must be serious this time; he never bothered with me unless we were fishing or engaging in other manly activities.

“Rokan,” she asked me. “Did you ask one of the girls to come to your house tonight for sex?”

Laughing, I told her that I had not. Sidestepping this one would be easy as I wouldn’t have to lie, or apologize. I actually hadn’t done it.

“Are you sure?” She demanded. “Tebitema’s cousin has told everyone in Muribenua that she’s coming to your house tonight and that you will run off with her in the morning.”

As I began to pick through the Kiribati language dictionary for a stronger, more impressive way to deny the tale, my host father butted in.

“Well, why didn’t you invite her over? You’re not married back in America.” This was not a question, but closer to an accusation – 26 year-olds in Kiribati are mostly married, or at least very interested in finding a mate. I had prepared to head this one off: I was about to tell him that I am very dedicated to my career and school goals just hadn’t found time for women when my host mother beat me to the punch, addressing my host father and using a word that I had never heard.

“Perhaps he’s binebinaine.” Teuriri’s eyes grew wide at the thought, and he ended the conversation by walking off. I made a last denial of the story, and headed for my house, feeling vaguely disquieted.

Later, as I was trying to sleep, I thought about the word I had heard. I knew the two parts of it: bine means worst or last, and aine means woman. A meaning for the word suggested itself readily, and it took a few weeks to decide whom to ask about it. I went to see Katuri, a Protestant minister and my language teacher. Her knowledge of English combined with my Kiribati would mean that we could have a nearly-fluent conversation, and with fewer misunderstandings than I usually had with people. When I asked her what the word meant, she laughed.

“It means two things,” she explained. “It’s a man who acts like a woman, either by cooking and cleaning instead of fishing and building, or by. . .you know. Acting like a woman in bed.”

Just as I thought. I pressed the issue further, as she seemed to be taking it all in stride and, for the moment, as a passing curiosity of mine. I asked her if this was a bad thing, as Twabeneti and Teuriri seemed somewhat scandalized. Katuri answered that yes, it was a bad thing, especially for a man. Slightly less objectionable, she told me, is the female version, binebimwane, though men really hated it when a woman tried to fish beyond the edge of the shore, where it was acceptable for them to gather shellfish and use nets to hunt for smaller fish.

This news was contrary to most of the books I had read about sexuality in Pacific cultures prior to my journey to Kiribati, which had claimed widespread acceptance of homosexuality, as well as a sort of fluidity in sexual and gender identity not permitted by American culture specifically and Western cultures generally. I had read stories of boys being raised as girls, growing and styling their hair as women would and engaging in the work of the household, raising children and even becoming the spouses of other men. (Women, too, had a history of co-habitation and child-rearing with other women, some of whom even took on the very male duty of fishing on the open ocean. However, I never heard of female children raised as boys.) Various authors theorized that this occurred most often in families lacking household domestic help, though I find it unlikely that such a circumstance would be sufficient to change a child’s gender role in the patriarchal culture of Kiribati. I find it more likely that the parents of these third-gender boys were responding to differences in their children’s attitudes and behavior, which were ultimately predicative of the boys’ sexual preferences.

Admittedly, the most comprehensive sources of information regarding Micronesian sexuality that I had read were quite old and had come from the Peace Corps library on Tarawa, the capital. Written in the decades prior to Kiribati officially becoming a British colony in 1892, my sources belonged to a time before the Catholic and Protestant churches began in earnest their battle for the hearts and souls of the I-Kiribati. The full story, as one of the Peace Corps trainers told me on the capital island, is found in the diaries of missionaries to the islands. Though I never had the opportunity to read them, I’m told that purging the I-Kiribati of their tolerance was and is a constant struggle for them. The I-Kiribati could buy that covering up their bodies despite the heat was acceptable because God didn’t like nudity, but they couldn’t seem to get behind sexual prosecutions. Several generations later saw regulations regarding propriety had really taken hold only discursively, and the extent to which the I-Kiribati now see these Puritan notions as their own is debatable given that they tend not to punish people too harshly for transgressing them, with only a few notable exceptions. As such, the situation that exists for gay people in Kiribati now is quite mild compared to those of some other former colonial properties, despite the systematic inculcation of these harsh values. The I-Kiribati are quite blasé about what people do of their own accords and take a live-and-let-live attitude towards life, playing diligent lip-service to the sexual ideals of the church but generally allowing for those brave enough to live openly a fair chance at happiness. A gay child might be cause for some dramatic outbursts and regular rounds of village gossip but, ultimately, would not be the end of the world for I-Kiribati parents.

In this sense, the backlash of colonialism has been very mild in Kiribati compared to the many other regions of the world that still struggle with problems of colonized identity and history. In these places, confronting institutions and ideals of alien origin often comes at much greater cost to minority groups. For instance, in the bloody aftermath of colonialism, sexual minorities in sub-Saharan Africa have come under fire as having actually been created by the white intruders, and are subject to bitter recrimination, ostracism and violence. As I was told in Botswana, homosexuality is one of the “white man’s diseases,” along with HIV and capitalism. The colonization of southern African regions has been so complete that all traces of previous, much more tolerant societies (which, as in Kiribati, did exist) have been erased. Given the much longer and intense period of colonization in the region, this is, perhaps, not surprising. Kiribati is an interesting case because the effects were not totalizing; people still behave largely according to their own system, despite proclaiming fealty to another.

Given that much of my work involved the church in one way or another, I needed to find a way to answer the question, which I knew would arise again, especially as my time as a single man in Kiribati grew longer. In the end, I ended up making the whole thing a non-issue by using a very I-Kiribati method of distraction: I made it into a joke. The next time someone asked me, “What are you? Binebinaine?” I told half of the truth.

“Yes, of course. I’m an American – we cook.”