homogenizing the homosexual
On a hot June night in 1969 the sexual discourses of theology, law and psychology encountered resistance so strong that millions of lives were changed. In a small gay bar in New York, the regulars, an eclectic mix of drag queens, transexuals, effeminate men and butch women, offered up the most visible resistance ever witnessed to the relentless exercising of public power on their private lives. The three-day street riot, began by Stonewall patrons, spilled onto the front pages and television screens of a nation. The exposure placed the queen, queer and dyke in the living rooms, kitchens and supermarkets of straight America. The resistance of gays to the external and internal subjectification of themselves as sinners, sodomites and psychopaths began.Before this seminal event, gays were known, but their lives operated in the back streets and alleyways of urban life. They were invisible to mainstream North Americans and expected to stay in the shadows where their deviant bodies belonged. The patrons of the Stonewall bar lived at the precipice of gay life. Their adoption of cross dressing was an affront to prevailing sexual norms. Women in suits and men in scarves and chiffon were the most identifiable of deviants and they
They embraced every stereotype and took the constitution of the gay subject to extremes. This judgement has gays internalizing their own surveillance and placing others of similar orientation under a watchful eye. There are now substantive benefits to self identification as a 'normal' gay. The stereotypes of leather wearers, S/M perverts, drag queens and diesel dykes are the gay community's dirty little secret. The state no longer requires harsh laws and punitive punishments to control the behavior of the gay subject, they do the deed themselves. More importantly it garnered the 'freaks' the respect and admiration of the millions of silent women and men across North America. The successful fights for judicial changes and the massive attention received by mainstream mass media has shown gays the power of the normalcy claim. But, external surveillance is limited in scope and an inefficient way for bio power to exercise itself on subjects. Invisible gays continually surveyed themselves for any outward signs of their sin that would lead to public detection. These queens, queers and dykes were dangerous. Society's ability to reach into the lives of closeted gays and classify them was waning and bio power needed visible subjects to define. To produce new subjects every possible sexual variation was catalogued: homosexual, fag, dyke, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual, transvestite, trisexual and intra-gendered. The promise and availability of certain social advantages has given people cause to actively internalize the identity of this new gay subject. The physical and verbal abuse by police, abandonment by families and lack of social opportunity experience by the most identifiable queers kept most of North America's gays firmly underground.
Common topics in this essay:
North America,
North Americans,
,
Michel Foucault's,
North America's,
bio power,
gay subject,
heterosexual world,
discourse biology,
relation power,
bars clubs,
drag queens,
external surveillance,
private lives,
|
Acceptance Essays
