Search Results

This chapter examines conservative arguments from the gendered nature of marriage as a relation of husband and wife, and others based on children's interests. It first considers the conservatives' idea of marriage as an essentially gendered relationship of husband and wife before discussing the debate in the U.S. Senate in 2004 over a Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) to the Constitution. In particular, it explores two main claims advanced by Republican supporters of the FMA on the Senate floor: first, that traditional heterosexual marriage tends to promote children's wellbeing (which is true), and, second, that same-sex matrimony would damage or destroy heterosexual marriage. The chapter proceeds by reviewing the evidence regarding the impact of same-sex marriage on children's welfare and concludes by asking whether greater acceptance of marriages between gay males could contribute to the weakening of marriage.

This chapter returns to Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, acknowledging Eve Sedgwick’s designation of the novella as a foundational text for modern gay male identity. Focusing on the neglected figure of the African sailor, the narrative’s original beautiful sailor, the chapter investigates how nostalgic fantasies about the savage or the primitive mediate same-sex desire in the novella. The chapter presents Billy Budd’s blond beauty as surrogacy for the African sailor, the original fetish of Melville’s narrative. Blondness figures in Billy Budd as a proxy for primitiveness. The chapter argues that the perpetual deferral of homosexual desire performed by the narrative and embodied in the figure of the sexually frustrated Claggart construct a model of autonomy for gay modernity in constituting its interiority—its “inside story” as it were, what Sedgwick will term the epistemological closet.

This chapter discusses Oncale in greater detail and examines the role of homophobia in propping up the inequalities central to the sex discrimination MacKinnon challenges. In her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women, she writes, within the context of gay male sexual harassment: “It would be strange, if efficient, if a landmark sexual harassment case were decided in a homosexual context, simultaneously recognizing that sexual harassment and employment deprivation in a same-sex context can be sex discrimination. But stranger things have happened than a simultaneous legal precedent for gays and for women sexually harassed by men—for reasons deriving from that moment in sexism where male supremacy and homophobia converge.” MacKinnon's foregrounding of the role of homophobia as a “weapon of sexism” has received little if any attention from the judiciary.

This chapter explores some of the complex challenges that are part of the lives of gay men in the early 21st century. It considers two potential experiences in the gay male life course that remain poorly understood. First it considers the challenges facing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive gay men in preventing the forward transmission of HIV and establishing positive sex lives. Second, it looks at the experience of relationship dissolution for gay men. The chapter seeks to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of these potential experiences of the gay male life course through the use of narrative methods. Finally, it presents inferences about gay narratives, identity, and the life course in the current century.

This chapter examines theories concerning lesbians and gay males at the midlife stage to understand better the development of sexual identity at this particular period in life. Studies show there is superior diversity and more flexibility in growth patterns for lesbians and gay males as compared to heterosexuals. Career issues for lesbians and gay males also appear in this period as a respond to discrimination such as preference for self-employment, withdrawal from competition, and a mind-set towards retirement. There seems to be a commonality between lesbians and gay males in terms of styles of balancing career and relationship commitments and preferences for partners complementing the same direction. Despite a lack of data variations in race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and heterosexual experiences are believed to be influencing patterns in the midlife stage for both sexual identities.

The second chapter provides an overview of the concept of homosexual men, commonly known as “gay men”, and how this definition contrasts with perceptions on lesbianism and bisexuality. A developmental perspective assists in understanding the issues, functions, and personalities of gay men as compared to other sexual identities such as lesbian. There are differences in experience between gay males and lesbians during the coming out process yet the process truthfully affects the core identity and behavior of the person involved. Another related phenomenon is the manifestation of internalized homophobia on the attitudes, beliefs, and careers of homosexual men and women. Diversity of experimental groups in terms of race and ethnicity even makes the journey of conceptualization interesting. In addition, the minority status of gay and lesbian individuals can be an asset or liability depending on how the issue is approached.

This essay presents a critical commentary on the state of gay male politics and community life. Reflecting upon experiences that were overtly political as well as personal, Berube investigates how race gets constructed, seemingly without intentionality but with profound consequences. The whiteness of “gay male” as a social category has significant implications for how the agenda of a movement gets set, what kind of successes and limitations a movement has, and who reaps the benefits from a politics of sexual identity. Here, Berube also encourages the exploration of the many ways that homosexuality is shaped by race, class, and gender. He also shares that whenever he gets to the social category “gay man,” students' response is always the same: “white and well-to-do.”

The author maintains that vernacular photographs-commonly in the form of snapshots, not professional portraits-have been underappreciated as a cultural performance that does cultural work. Displaying and analyzing a representative sample from his own vast collection of everyday photographs of American males together, and informed by his systematic review of many other such images, John Ibson holds that the aftermath of World War II witnessed an unprecedented separation between American males, a distancing found even in boy culture. Differences are especially stark and revealing between how males in the military posed together during the Second World War and in the years afterward, and between how American boys situated themselves in snapshots taken before the 1950s and those taken during that decade. In the privacy of homes or the seclusion of other designated spaces, men who identified themselves as gay sometimes demonstrated an intimacy in photos that in earlier periods was much more widespread among American males. The distancing evident in this chapter’s photographs are, the author suggests, a literal, visual representation of the various other forms of separation between males that were encouraged, even harshly insisted upon, in postwar America, the subject of the rest of the book.

This chapter discusses the ways in which gay Asian American men construct social identities within the larger confines of race and sexuality, paying attention to how they construct these identities through the stories they tell about what it means to be both gay and Asian. It argues that identities are actively negotiated and maintained through interaction with others and the larger social environment, and that gay Asian male identity is a response to the racialized and sexualized situation that those who come to view themselves as gay Asian American men experience in the United States. Constructing a gay Asian male identity also defines how being gay and Asian makes one different from “regular” gays and Asians. The chapter explores the social and historical experiences of “difference” that begin to define them as a group not quite a part of “Asian America” or “gay America.”

Chapter 6 depicts the history of urban bachelorhood and discusses the different visions and representations of the bachelor as non-father: from the pious Christian shepherd to the urban bohemian and the incorporation of modern masculinity out of control. These many potential facets of being a bachelor in turn-of-the-century urban America merge in the life course of YMCA director Robert R. McBurney. Historical writings by and on him as well as his archival papers provide ample material to unfold the history of unmarried men in the context of the history of sexuality and of what historian George Chauncey called “the gay male world.” The chapter also discusses how the perception of bachelorhood changed against the backdrop of the evolving sexual and social sciences, which depicted fatherhood as the “natural” development of every man’s life and pathologized any other form of male existence.

This essay describes how Berube devoted himself to historical research that was specifically sexual in its focus. The result was intervention in the public policy debates about how to respond to the epidemic. Based on another innovative slide lecture and first published in a San Francisco gay newspaper in the immediate wake of the city's closure of gay bathhouses, the essay builds on and extends the thematic concerns of the previous two essays. Here, Berube describes gay male sexuality and the places where it could be expressed as forms and sites of resistance. Sexual expression became a route to the creation of community, and the bathhouses proved to be key locations where this happened over time. Arguing that, in the past, attempts at repression have failed, Berube calls instead for more creative solutions that make use of gay male spaces such as bathhouses to educate the community about safer sex practices.

This chapter draws conclusions from the analyses presented in From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures. After a short summary of the content in the previous chapters of the book, the implications for understanding of indexicality and gender are discussed. Particular attention is given to the indexical disjuncture, in which signs with opposing indexical associations are linked to simultaneously index conflicting or contradictory meanings. It is argued that although indexical disjuncture is not unique to gay male culture, it is a common hallmark of gay male style. The chapter then discusses the ways in which language use highlights differences in understandings of gay community and issues related to social acceptance and social change.

This book concludes with a discussion on the gay legacy of literary decadence and its influence on C. P. Cavafy's poetic expression of homosexuality, and how it continues to play a role in the ongoing attraction of queer artists and critics to his work. By focusing on his erotic poetry, it shows that Cavafy often sublimates raw sexuality in favor of a more elevated passion transfigured by memory and aestheticized by art. It suggests that Cavafy also presents a genuine physicality in poems that worship male beauty and recount specific sexual encounters. Finally, the chapter argues that Cavafy's erotic poems illustrate “the peculiar merging of eroticism and aestheticism that is distinctive to gay male culture,” and that his “kitschification” as a gay icon may be a manifestation of his unique relationship to the decadent tradition.

The chapter analyzes language use in Circuit Noize, a magazine distributed at circuit parties, a type of rave dance party for gay men. The magazine positioned itself as representing the “circuit boy” subculture that developed around circuit parties. The magazine promoted the use of in-group circuit boy slang and awarded prizes for examples of witty camp language overheard at circuit parties. After an overview of circuit subculture, the chapter presents a detailed discussion of the language ideology promoted by the magazine. The language ideology in Circuit Noize served to differentiate circuit boys from other men, both gay and straight. Although the personal style of circuit boy subculture emphasized expressions of masculinity similar to those associated with heterosexual men, the use of language promoted by the magazine serves to differentiate circuit masculinity from heterosexual masculinity.

This chapter discusses the appropriation of stereotypes of southern speech among early members of the (gay male) bear subculture. Bear subculture emphasizes the properties of being heavyset and having higher-than-average amounts of body hair. The chapter begins with an overview of bear subculture, including a history of the emergence of the subculture in the early 1990s. The chapter then discusses the emergence of bear slang and the use of the “bear codes” on the Bear Mailing List. It is argued that early bear subculture constructed gay masculinity through the appropriation of stereotyped representations of southern working-class men. An analysis of language use on the Bear Mailing List reveals the use of Mock Hillbilly, a linguistic style characterized by the exaggerated representations of Appalachian and Ozark dialects of English, including the use of eye-dialect in email messages. It is argued that the appropriation of southern stereotypes allowed early bears to construct a form of masculinity that aligned with being overweight.

This chapter attempts to traverse the difficulties that narrative machinery encounters in blackness-in/as-abjection by visiting a kind of text that generically aims to work with (and to work) psychic/body responses: pornographic writing. In Samuel Delany's The Mad Man (1994), a literary pornographic work, the protagonist John Marr is a black gay male character who feverishly seeks out the pleasure of sexual acts that involve some form of apparent humiliation or degradation. It is argued that what is represented in The Mad Man is something in the nature of a rough model of working with the legacies of a history of conquest and enslavement (which is to say, with blackness, with having-been-blackened) through the transformation provided by erotic/sexual fantasies. Delany imagines a position that takes on board race without having at the same time to take up its fellow traveler, so often mistaken for the thing itself, ego. Is it possible to have race without ego, without defensive postures, without boundaries to police and ramparts on which to stand watch? The character of John Marr tries to model for us this position. Delany imagines him living his black body in its collective, sociogenic dimension, in which the demand to self-protection of that seductive individual I is refused in favor of one's becoming immersed in, lost in what it is to be the race, precisely as to be black means to have-been-blackened, to have been rendered abject.

This chapter discusses how developing technology has enabled people to have increasingly realistic virtual sexual encounters and whether these technological advances are actually bringing us closer together or driving us further apart. One is left to wonder that if sexual alternatives such as sex robots and online sex become more and more accessible, many individuals may simply come to prefer this nontraditionally partnered form of sex to the old-fashioned way. The chapter explores whether or not futurists will be correct in their prediction that, by 2050, human-on-robot sex will be more common than human-on-human sex and, if so, if this is necessarily good or bad.

Women, even though their rhetoric was casted out from the Spanish literary culture, became the inspiration of gay males during the post-Franco regime. Gay males simulated femininity during their Spanish drag performances and striptease, eventually indicating the rise of the Andalusian woman. The Andalusian woman is a transvestite and a transsexual embodying gay pride. This chapter examines Ana Rossetti’s novel Plumas de España as it typifies the absence of the Andalusian woman from Spanish literary politics and the popular imagination. Plumas de España is a product of gay imagination as it depicts the outright unacceptance of the Andalusian women within Spanish society during and after the Franco regime.