Of Monuments, Memories, Mahu and Movies: The Story Behind the Story of Kapaemahu

This summer, as a new film called Kapaemahu — by yours truly and my longtime collaborators Dean Hamer and Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu — makes its way around the world, an important debate on the meaning of monuments, memorialization, and the lessons of history is roiling the nation.

Most of the attention has been on the long overdue removal of statues that honor racist and imperialist figures from our ignoble past, but the story of Kapaemahu asks a different question: What of monuments that are dedicated to history’s heroes — yet dishonor them and distort history by concealing certain aspects of the heroes’ true identity?

Kapaemahu is the story of four stones placed on Waikiki Beach centuries ago in honor of four legendary mahu — people of dual male and female spirit — who brought the healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaii. After a long period of cultural disrespect, including being buried under a bowling alley, the stones were unearthed and a monument created. But unfortunately the story behind them was censored, and the fact that the healers were mahu, beloved by the people, was erased from view.

The rediscovery of the stones and the altering of their story aligns with the social and political thinking that emerged in Hawaii in the early 1960s, amplified in a series of inflammatory articles published in the Honolulu Advertiser that described a “growing community problem: transvestitism, deviates masquerading as women.”

The articles also chronicled the influence of the Honolulu Police Department, Mayor’s Committee on Children & Youth, and U.S. military authorities who were howling about the need to make “cross-dressing with the intent to deceive” a crime punishable by up to a year in jail in order to protect innocent men out for a night on the town with pretty local girls.

After the law, known as Act 175, was passed in 1963, many mahu in Honolulu, especially those who were performing at popular nightclubs like the Glade, began wearing “I Am A Boy” buttons to avoid arrest and abuse.

In such a hostile climate, is it any wonder that positive mention of mahu was left off the monument to Kapaemahu and out of the public record?

And what of the generations of mahu who faced countless acts of bigotry and discrimination, family rejection, and worse, never knowing that in Hawaii, people just like them were once included and revered, even honored by a culture and its history?

The consequences for mahu and other gender and sexual minorities are all too familiar among marginalized communities whose dignity and self worth are regularly attacked, including tragic disparities in access to education, health care, employment, housing, and other aspects of longterm well being.

Poet Adrienne Rich once expressed the conundrum like this: “When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you… when someone with authority describes the world and you are not in it, there is a psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing.”

Our aim is to help change that.

But there are many more twists and turns in this story, and Kapaemahu is evolving into a larger project to examine, illuminate, and hopefully, like those protesting racist monuments in the U.S., to correct the ways in which histories are recorded, learned, and remembered.

Coming in future columns, news about these other elements now in-development — including a feature documentary and a monumental exhibition set to open in Honolulu’s Bishop Museum in Spring 2022.

In the meantime, see the trailer, and find virtual screenings here.

And, may the healing spirits of Kapaemahu stay with you!