Adam Isaiah Green
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814772522
- eISBN:
- 9780814723814
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814772522.003.0007
- Subject:
- Sociology, Marriage and the Family
This chapter analyzes how gay and straight men's sexual life histories are powerfully shaped by the combination of early-life expectations about marriage and social structures that make marriage ...
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This chapter analyzes how gay and straight men's sexual life histories are powerfully shaped by the combination of early-life expectations about marriage and social structures that make marriage differentially available. Both access to and exclusion from civil marriage have powerful effects that resonate throughout the life course of heterosexual and homosexual men, respectively. Heterosexual access to and homosexual exclusion from civil marriage have produced the institutional backdrop against which a gay sexual subculture has emerged with a value system concerning intimate life forged in direct opposition to its heterosexual counterpart. Whereas the predominant, heterosexual, romantic meaning-constitutive tradition is anchored to the institution of heterosexual marriage, the queer meaning-constitutive tradition is anchored to the institutions of sexual sociality, including bars, nightclubs, and bathhouses.Less
This chapter analyzes how gay and straight men's sexual life histories are powerfully shaped by the combination of early-life expectations about marriage and social structures that make marriage differentially available. Both access to and exclusion from civil marriage have powerful effects that resonate throughout the life course of heterosexual and homosexual men, respectively. Heterosexual access to and homosexual exclusion from civil marriage have produced the institutional backdrop against which a gay sexual subculture has emerged with a value system concerning intimate life forged in direct opposition to its heterosexual counterpart. Whereas the predominant, heterosexual, romantic meaning-constitutive tradition is anchored to the institution of heterosexual marriage, the queer meaning-constitutive tradition is anchored to the institutions of sexual sociality, including bars, nightclubs, and bathhouses.
