Families with Fluid Boundaries
Families with Fluid Boundaries
The way power was used in Ronald Bayer’s essay, AIDS and the Bathhouse Controversy was quite interesting. Essentially, the question was whether the San Francisco government could control the private lives of gay individuals in the name of public health. As stated in the essay, the criminalization of homosexuality by the state had resulted in a “strategic posture” against the government, so “the ultimate challenge was to develop a language and practice of public health that would encourage the participation, rather than the resistance, of gay men” (Peiss, 471). The director of the San Francisco Department of Health, Silverman was not inclined to close down the bathhouses right away, at the risk of limiting civil liberties and alienating gay citizens. Instead, Silverman took several strategic steps to not alienate the gay community, including making an ally of a prominent figure in the gay community, Larry Littlejohn. When Silverman went ahead with the regulation of sexual behaviors in the bathhouses, he backed up his statements with gay physicians at his side, likely so that his actions would not appear prejudiced. And it was stated that once Silverman “[had] obtained what he believed was the political support of important elements in the gay community for closure, he could discard the rhetoric of individual liberty….” (480). Instead of knee-jerk attempts at regulation and closure, Silverman attempted to find allies and justifications from a public health perspective in order to react to AIDS in a way that would not alienate the gay community. Instead of imposing his power directly, Silverman attempted to wield it in a roundabout way for more effective results.Parts of Kath Weston’s essay on Gay Families as the “Families We Choose” were exemplified in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Weston states the families created within the gay community “tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organizations” (499). Weston also discusses the practice of families within the gay community rendering material and emotional assistance to one another and the non-erotic solitaries among the gay community (501). All of the aforementioned practices do occur in Angels In America. Prior and Louis are boyfriends and a family unit, and Louis is later coupled with Joe Pitt while Prior has solidarity/kinship ties to his former lover, Belize. Prior also experiences feelings of solidarity with Harper Pitt, Joe’s wife, as well as Hannah Pit, Joe’s mother, despite the fact that Louis has started seeing Joe and left Prior while he was sick. Harper and Hannah offer Prior emotional solidarity, as does Belize along with the material solidarity that she brings in the form of pills. Additionally, Roy Cohn expresses solidarity with Joe Pitt in an affectionate and material way as he offers him a job and discusses Joe’s personal life with him. The complicated relationships in Angels in America exemplify the fluid boundaries within the gay community, as well as the providing of emotional and material support to people who were not previously tied.
Additionally, some of the discussions of discrimination in Weston’s essay were also in Kushner’s plays. For instance, Weston references the gay men and lesbians often stereotyped each other, which was evident in Roy Cohn’s discussion of what sets him apart from other gay men what that he has “clout” and gets things done where other gay men could not (504). Weston also references racial discrimination as dividing the gay community, which was evident in Roy’s disparaging and derogatory treatment of Belize (505).
Tags: civil liberties, discrimination, family, gay, homosexuality, power, privacy, race, stereotypes, strategy
