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Being Gay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Carl F. Stychin
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Abstract

The article provides an overview of gay identity politics today. It begins with an introduction to the historical trajectory of the post-1945 period, and then turns to the challenges posed by queer politics and theory to gay identity politics. The related issue of the globalization of being gay is then considered, in terms of the universalizing of identity politics. Finally, the ramifications for gay identity politics of the political and legal recognition of same-sex relationships are discussed, leading to the obvious final question: whether being gay will continue to have a political logic in the years ahead.

Type
Politics of Identity – VII
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , 2005 , pp. 90 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2005.

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Footnotes

1

‘The Politics of Identity’ is an on-going series edited by Richard Bellamy.

2

The author is grateful to the series editor, Richard Bellamy, and to Davina Cooper, for helpful, critical comments on an earlier draft. Inevitably, this article is a personal and partial account of being gay. It is written from the perspective of a white, Western, gay man, and the perception of history and culture is inevitably my own and will be unfamiliar to many readers. No doubt they have their own stories to tell of being gay.

References

3 Jeffrey Weeks, Making Sexual History, Cambridge, Polity, 2000, p. 214.

4 Cindy Patton, ‘Tremble, Hetero Swine!’, in Michael Warner (ed.), Fear of a Queer Planet, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 173–4.

5 Joshua Gamson, ‘Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?: A Queer Dilemma’, reprinted in Steven Seidman (ed.), Queer Theory/Sociology, Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1996, p. 396.

6 The growth of radical lesbian feminism in this period is an obvious exception to my claim that rights-based, multicultural models dominated the era.

7 Lawrence Knopp, ‘Sexuality and Urban Space: Gay Male Identity Politics in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia’, in Ruth Fletcher and Jane M. Jacobs (eds), Cities of Difference, New York, Guilford Press, 1998, p. 149.

8 Gamson, ‘Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?’, op. cit., p. 396.

9 Steven Epstein, ‘Gay and Lesbian Movements in the United States’, in Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak and André Krouwel (eds), The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1999, p. 61.

10 See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York, Routledge, 1990.

11 Gamson, ‘Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?’, op. cit., p. 396.

12 Morris B. Kaplan, Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire, New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 71.

13 Gamson, ‘Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?’, op. cit., p. 404. This American conception of queerness bears close relation to much French gay theory; a good example of which is the work of Guy Hocquenghem, for whom ‘the homosexual movement is assigned a mission of radical destabilization: it challenges both those forms of civilization that are founded on “normal” sexuality and whatever forces of repression guarantee that sexuality's normality’: Eribon, Didier, ‘Michel Foucault's Histories of Sexuality’, (trans. by Michael Lucey), GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7: 1 (2001), p. 64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.

15 See Janet E. Halley, ‘The Politics of the Closet: Towards Equal Protection for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Identity’, in Jonathan Goldberg (ed.), Reclaiming Sodom, New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 145; Stychin, Carl F., ‘To Take Him “At His Word”: Theorizing Law, Sexuality and the US Military Exclusion Policy’, Social and Legal Studies, 5: 2 (1996), pp. 179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Steven Seidman, ‘Identity and Politics in a “Postmodern” Gay Culture: Some Historical and Conceptual Notes’, in Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, op. cit., p. 133.

17 David M. Halperin, ‘Gay Identity After Foucault’, in Lucille Cairns (ed.), Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France, Bern, Peter Lang, 2002, p. 18.

18 Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem: Beyond Gay Identity, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997, p. 38.

19 Patton, ‘Tremble, Hetero Swine!’, op. cit., p. 162.

20 Epstein, ‘Gay and Lesbian Movements in the United States’, op. cit., p. 62. See also Bernstein, Mary, ‘Celebration and Suppression: The Strategic Uses of Identity by the Lesbian and Gay Movement’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 3 (1997), p. 536 CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘some sort of identity is necessary to translate individual to group interests and individual to collective action’.

21 Epstein, ‘Gay and Lesbian Movements in the United States’, op. cit., p. 62. See also Smith, Ralph R. and Windes, Russel R., ‘Identity in Political Context: Lesbian/Gay Representation in the Public Sphere’, Journal of Homosexuality, 37: 2 (1999), p. 25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

22 William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer Theory, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2000, p. 34.

23 Gamson, ‘Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?’, op. cit., p. 409.

24 Max H. Kirsch, Queer Theory and Social Change, London, Routledge, 2002, pp. 97–8.

25 Momin Rahman, Sexuality and Democracy, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 117.

26 Simon Watney, Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 252.

27 Ibid., p. 254.

28 Kirsch, Queer Theory and Social Change, op. cit., p. 99.

29 Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem, op. cit., p. 40.

30 Steven Seidman, Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life, New York, Routledge, 2002, p. 17. See also David Bell and Jon Binnie, The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond, Cambridge, Polity, 2000, p. 61, wherein the authors distinguish between the social constitution of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ homosexual on the basis of the ‘narrow bounds of normalcy’.

31 Gamson, ‘Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?’, op. cit., p. 410. Relatedly, Jeffrey Weeks, Making Sexual History, op. cit., p. 190, refers to the need to ‘embrace two distinct political moments’, namely, ‘the moment of transgression’ and the ‘moment of citizenship’.

32 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal, New York, The Free Press, 1999, p. 31.

33 Bell and Binnie, The Sexual Citizen, op. cit., p. 74.

34 Murray Pratt, ‘Post-Queer and Beyond the PaCS: Contextualising French Responses to the Civil Solidarity Pact’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis and Murray Pratt (eds), In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, p. 178.

35 Valocchi, Steve, ‘The Class-Inflected Nature of Gay Identity’, Social Problems, 46 (1999), p. 220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Kirsch, Queer Theory and Social Change, op. cit., p. 78.

37 Valocchi, ‘The Class-Inflected Nature of Gay Identity’, op. cit., p. 220. The American television series, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (and its British remake) provide a popular cultural example of this phenomenon.

38 Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak and André Krouwel, ‘Gay and Lesbian Movements Beyond Borders?’, in Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak and André Krouwel, The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1999, p. 354.

39 Ibid.

40 Kirsch, Queer Theory and Social Change, op. cit., p. 78. See also Dennis Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity?: The Internationalization of Gay Identities’, in John C. Hawley (ed.), Postcolonial Queer, Albany, NY, SUNY Press, p. 31: ‘what seems universal – even something as specific as a homosexual bathhouse or a disco – will be changed and mediated through the individual culture and political economy of each society’.

41 Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel, ‘Gay and Lesbian Movements Beyond Borders?’, op. cit., pp. 351–5.

42 Dennis Altman, ‘Global Gaze/Global Gays’, in Mark Blasius (ed.), Sexual Identities Queer Politics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 113.

43 See Jon Binnie, The Globalization of Sexuality, London, Sage Publications, 2004, ch. 6.

44 See Carl F. Stychin, A Nation by Rights, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1998.

45 Weeks, Making Sexual History, op. cit., p. 213.

46 See Carl F. Stychin, Law's Desire: Sexuality and the Limits of Justice, London, Routledge, 1995, ch. 2.

47 Henning Bech (trans. by Teresa Mesquit and Tim Davies), When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity, Cambridge, Polity, 1997, p. 195.

48 Bell and Binnie, The Sexual Citizen, op. cit., p. 133.

49 Mark Blasius, ‘An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence’, in Mark Blasius (ed.), Sexual Identities Queer Politics, op. cit., p. 155.

50 David Halperin, Saint=Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 122. In fact, the editor of this present series of articles has described identity more generally ‘as a process rather than an essence’; ‘that each form of “being” is at one and the same time a process of “becoming” ’: Bellamy, Richard, ‘Identity Politics, Introduction to a New Series’, Government and Opposition, 37: 3 (2002), pp. 299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Frédéric Martel, (trans. by Jane Marie Todd), The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 359.

52 Halperin, ‘Gay Identity After Foucault’, op. cit., p. 21.

53 For a very nuanced analysis that the politics of same-sex marriage are ambiguous in the context of wider social relations, see Davina Cooper, ‘Like Counting Stars?: Re-Structuring Equality and the Socio-Legal Space of Same-Sex Marriage’, in Robert Wintemute and Mads Adendas (eds), Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2001, p. 75.

54 Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, Cambridge, Polity, 1992.

55 Weeks, Making Sexual History, op. cit., p. 240. See also Blasius, ‘An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence’, op. cit., p. 150, who emphasizes the idea of choice as central to the forging of a gay ethos: ‘to construct a life by choosing among alternative conducts, values and aspirations, to understand one's own life in terms of the outcomes of such choices, and to account for one's life in terms of the reasons for one's choices’.

56 Bech, When Men Meet, op. cit., p. 196.

57 Lützen, Karin, ‘Gay and Lesbian Politics: Assimilation or Subversion: A Danish Perspective’, Journal of Homosexuality, 35 (1998), p. 239.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

58 Eribon, ‘Michel Foucault's Histories of Sexuality’, op. cit., p. 72.

59 Ibid., p. 73.

60 See Blasius, ‘An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence’, op. cit., p. 164; Bell and Binnie, The Sexual Citizen, op. cit., pp. 133–4.

61 Bellamy, ‘Identity Politics, Introduction to a New Series’, op. cit., p. 297.

62 Secomb, Linnell, ‘Fractured Community’, Hypatia, 15: 2 (2000), p. 147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar