WHEN CAPTAIN JAMES COOK and his crew first encountered the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, they underwent many shocks to their sensitivities, but none more astonishing than the natives’ acceptance of aikāne—intimate friends of the same sex. At first the foreigners were unsure what the word meant. Second Lieutenant James King, upon being told by a young man that he was aikāne to the chief, remarked: “We do not know for certain what relation an Aikāne is to the King; nor are willing to credit what some have learnt from the Women.” But within two months, James King “had no doubt of what an Aikāne meant,” which he characterized as “the foulest pollutions that disgrace the men.” David Samwell, the surgeon’s mate, was more specific: “their business is to commit the Sin of Onan upon the old King.” This same-sex interest was not limited to royalty nor to native men, as Samwell observed when a Hawaiian man visited his ship and “seeing a handsome young fellow whose appearance he liked much, offered six large Hogs to the Captain if he would let him stand his Aikāne for a little while, such is the strange depravity of these Indians.”
For the next two centuries, a long procession of foreign colonizers, missionaries, and settlers, together with the many Hawaiians and plantation worker immigrants who adopted Western ways, did everything they could to discourage, delegitimize, criminalize, and punish same-sex relationships. They even redefined aikāne to strip it of its sexual connotation (much to the chagrin of dictionary-trained missionaries whose requests to become the aikāne of Hawaiian men were met with great merriment). They failed to appreciate that aikāne relationships were more than purely social or romantic; they were interwoven into the fabric of Hawaiian society, and over time there would be bold individuals who would insist that same-sex relations be recognized and respected as a vital component of their indigenous way of life. The most prominent but also misunderstood of these heroic figures was Kaomi Moe, the aikāne of a Hawaiian king who came to be his co-ruler.