The ethnographic documentary film Des hommes et des dieux (2002) by Haitian diaspora directors Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire discusses the place of same-sex desire and cross-gender expression within Haiti, focusing on the Afro-diasporic religion of Haitian Vodou. The directors introduce the viewer to a small cast of men from mostly urban communities. The viewer is led through their everyday experiences and identifications as masisi, to use the Kreyòl term the subjects themselves reappropriate in the film. They share their concerns, fears, desires and, importantly, the role of Vodou within their lives. The ethos of the African-derived Vodou tradition dissolves binary divisions and integrates fluid identities that permeate and undo the constraints of Western dualisms. These include oppositions of matter and spirit, Cartesian separations of mind and body, but also the divisions of colour, class and gender that have been so important in maintaining the French colonial economy (Dayan, 1994: 6; Bellegarde-Smith and Michel, 2013: 472). Through Vodou possession, the body of the initiate is transformed and takes on the gender and characteristics of the spirit, regardless of their biological sex. Some of the interviewees in Des hommes claim that Vodou provides an explanation for their sexual orientation, that the black mother lwa or spirit Ezili Dantò, whose Catholic lithograph doubles intercut the film, has made them who they are: ‘Ezili Dantò chose me when I was very young’ argues one of the men, or even ‘Lwa gate’m’ [The spirits have ruined me].

In order to understand the complex identity coordinates of these expressions in Vodou, this chapter will first trace the current hegemonic model of Haitian masculinity to the post-emancipation, post-revolutionary period of the early nineteenth century where we see both the persistence and subversion of colonial categories of race and gender in Haitian society through family and religious communities. The structural continuities are foregrounded in order to justify the recycling and reformation of masculinist revolutionary types: Jean-Jacques ‘Papa’ Dessalines, Henri ‘Roi’ Christophe, Alexandre ‘Papa Bon Kè’ Pétion.