This week’s readings in Chapters 13 and 14 of Peiss’ Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality focus on homosexuality, or more specifically, the gay and lesbian community. Kath Weston’s essay “Gay Families as the ‘Families We Choose’” discusses the connections gays and lesbians make with other people like them in terms of kinship. The idea of choosing one’s own family, especially if that person’s biological family has disowned him or something of that nature for admitting his (or her) sexuality, sounds appealing and creates a sense of solidarity between fellow homosexuals.
This sense of community is shown throughout the play Angels in America by Tony Kushner, especially between the characters
What I found interesting is why there was a need to create these kinship relationships in the first place; the isolation of the gay and lesbian community by the dominant society. Their sexuality and lifestyle was, and possibly still are, not acceptable by heterosexual standards. One of the ways in which homosexuals are separated from the general population is through stereotypes. One of these stereotypes was about AIDS. Back when it was introduced in the 1980s, AIDS was believed to be a gay disease that could be caught by casual contact. Because of AIDS, feared homosexuals because they thought could get sick just by associating with them. People with AIDS were seen as inferior physically and socially to the supposedly straight, moral, and healthy majority because of lack of knowledge, which the Denver Principles in 1983 tried to correct.
Act One, Scene 9 in Part One of Kushner’s Angels in America addresses the issue of AIDS and homosexuality well. Roy Cohn’s doctor, Henry, assumes that
“Your problem… is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean… Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does and individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order... [S]omething much simpler: clout.”
Today, while AIDS is still prevalent, most people know that the disease spreads through bodily fluids like blood and saliva, not through simply touching people, and that it affects more than just homosexuals. But the stereotype still exists, as shown by the response by Cleveland’s Black community in 1998 to AIDS, where many were convinced that not only that it was a gay disease, but a white gay disease, so black people are not affected.
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Patrick, this is an
Your point about the power of
Your point about the power of friendship is well taken. I would add also that the critique of friendship and its exclusionary aspects is limited at best. I say this because there is a fundamental difference between community and friendship in terms of the how people are interacting. While we can clearly trace the arc of a friendship from start to finish, a community makes a claim on immortality. This is because a friendship doesn't come into existence until two people start physically (or now, virtually) interacting and experiencing things together. The basis for any alienation or exclusionary practices thereafter are formed in terms of the relationship itself. So, while a friendship can be potentially exclusionary, a community is intrisically exclusionary. Here is a quote from the end of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (one of my favorite books) that highlights the nature of community:
"Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of 'forgetting' the experience of continuity . . . engenders the need for a narrative of 'identity.' . . . In the secular story of the 'person' [here we can replace the word 'person' with the word 'friendship' to better illustrate the point] there is a beginning and an end. She emerges from parental genes and social circumstances onto a brief historical stage, there to play a role until her death. After that, nothing but the penumbra of lingering fame or influence. . . . Nations [or other imagined communities, more generally], however, have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural. Because there is no Origninator, the nation's biography can not be written evangelically . . . through a long procreative chain of begettings. The only alternative is to fashion it . . . wherever the lamp of archaeology casts its fitful gleam. This fashioning, however, is marked by deaths. . . . From . . . remoreselessly accumulating cemeteries . . . the nation's biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as 'our own.'"
Hi to all of you. This will