Out of the Closet and Into the World : OUT IN THE WORLD: Gay and Lesbian Life From Buenos Aires to Bangkok <i> By Neil Miller</i> , <i> (Random House: $22; 369 pp.)</i>

There are two essential American journeys. One is a discovery, the other an escape. When Mark Twain’s Huck Finn decides to “light out for the prairie,” he is shedding his skin, and losing himself in the West. But American literature reveals a parallel urge to affirm identity, a search that moves in the opposite direction from Huck’s. In “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael travels east, from New England, to be submerged in the sea, where he grasps his connectedness to the world.

Release from responsibility for the past is, perhaps, the official American impulse, but the transcendent goal of identifying with the world is equally compelling. Neil Miller’s “Out in the World” is a piece of 19th-Century New England transcendentalism, from the point of view of a gay, suburban, Jewish liberal journalist, nostalgic for the social and political energies of the early 1970s. More than a gay travelogue, it is an adventure story in which the narrator obscures his own personality in order to achieve a fuller sense of himself, and his place in the world.

Miller is a professional and, perhaps, a temperamental outsider. His first book, “In Search of Gay America,” scrupulously renders the experiences of lesbians and gays living in the margins of small-town American culture. Expanding his scope in this new book, he has taken on the world--not immodestly, but tentatively, with a sense of his own limitations. For Miller is a supremely self-effacing narrator. He prefers to let his subjects speak for themselves, sometimes in formal interviews but mostly in casual conversations, over coffee, at dinner parties, or socializing at all-gay gatherings in bars, or at AIDS fund-raising events. Plainly observed and gracefully reported in prose that sinks to clichee less often than it rises to the ironic, Miller’s close encounters illuminate cultures whose attitudes toward sex and sexual orientation range from the medieval to the modern.

It is as a gay man and an American that Miller visits newly emergent and established lesbian and gay communities in post-apartheid South Africa, reunified Berlin, newly democratic Argentina and an increasingly Americanized Japan, as well as Cairo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, several different regions of Australia and New Zealand, and progressive Denmark, the only country in the world where gay and lesbian couples can legally marry. Early on, however, Miller grasps the chimerical nature of his journey. “Once you crossed the Mediterranean,” he notes, “the terms ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ revealed themselves to be Western cultural concepts that confused more than they elucidated.” In Johannesburg and Cairo, Sydney and Osaka, homosexuality defies anyone’s attempts to define or excuse it.

One of Miller’s first conversations is with a gay man from Soweto, named Linda (apparently a common man’s name in South Africa). According to Linda, “Township gay male culture . . . revolved around cross-dressing and sexual role-playing and the general idea that if gay men weren’t exactly women, they were some variation thereof, a third sex. No one, including gay men, seemed to be quite sure what ‘gay’ meant-- were gay men really women? men? or something in between?”Treated like a girl by his parents, sent out on “girls’ shopping days,” Linda was even considered capable of bearing children. A boyfriend’s mother urged Linda and her son to have sex as much as possible. “We’d get up on a Saturday morning, she’d give us a glass of milk, and she’d send us back to bed.” This continued until a doctor convinced the woman that “it was quite impossible for a man, even a gay man, to bear a child.”

The notion of gay identity is further complicated for black South Africans, Miller notes, by the clear anti-gay prejudice of many members of the African National Congress. An ANC executive-committee member in London had recently commented, “In a normal society, there will be no gays because everyone will be normal.” Pressured by gay groups, the ANC had subsequently included a clause in its proposed bill of rights protecting against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Nevertheless, anti-gay feelings within the ANC resurfaced during Winnie Mandela’s trial for the assault of four teen-aged boys whom she believed were having sex with each other. Mandela’s supporters carried placards outside the courtroom reading “Homsex Is Not In Black Culture.”

Sex between men apparently is an accepted tradition in Arab societies, where Islamic fundamentalism and Christian strictures have not wholly demonized sex and, particularly, homosexuality. Nevertheless, homosexuality is practiced but not acknowledged in Egypt by men who claim to be exclusively the dominant partners in male-male sex. According to one of Miller’s confidantes, 90% of Egyptian men are “active” partners in periodic gay sex, while 10% are “passive”--a telling ratio for a male population that associates gayness (if it characterizes it at all) with the “passive” sexual position. “The 10% must have been keeping very busy,” Miller skeptically comments.

If Egyptians minimize homosexuality among men, they deny it completely with women. But the reluctance to believe that lesbians exist shows up equally in Islamic, Buddhist and Christian cultures--one of the truly enlightening revelations of Miller’s book. However, lesbian identity is generally linked to women’s equality. Egyptian lesbians are invisible because Egyptian women are invisible. Lesbians in Japan have begun to emerge as a community as Japanese women gain economic and political ground. Cultures that legislate against homosexual behavior generally neglect to include women in their restrictions, because female sexuality is considered insignificant.

The question of identity is central to Miller’s journey. What does it mean to be gay, and male, and American, among, for instance, gay Maoris in New Zealand? Or with a married gay male couple in Copenhagen celebrating a 40-year-long relationship?

As much as an exploration of gay and lesbian life in Asia, Africa and Europe, Miller’s book is a meditation on American gay liberation. Obliquely, Miller contemplates the mobility gained and, sometimes, the freedom lost in proclaiming oneself a member of what is variously interpreted as a political struggle, a sexual lifestyle, a religious affront, a sensibility, a perversion or an aesthetic choice. In the 20th-Century world, homosexuality remains to emerge not as an identity but as an integral, if not all-defining, aspect of self.