From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Fri Dec 03 1999 - 10:52:32 MST
On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Damien Broderick wrote:
> (I also think bisexuality doesn't really need an explanation, since rubbing
> rude bits together is obviously fun and social and good for power trips,
> etc, unless you've been socialised out of it [as I was and I gather you
> weren't]. It's *dedicated* gayness that's the puzzle.)
>
> Damien
By "dedicated" gayness I'm assuming you mean gayness as an identity or
orientation as opposed to occasional samesex practices -- a crucial
distinction that some folks in this debate are insisting on and some folks
ignoring. Historian John D'Emilio offers an interesting account of the
relatively recent emergence of recognizably "gay" identities in his essay,
"Capitalism and Gay Identity." The essay appears in an anthology of his
writings called _Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the
University_, should anybody want to check it out. Here is a quotation
from the essay that seems relevant:
"[G]ay men and lesbians have not always existed. Instead, they are a
product of history, and have come into existence in a specific historical
era. Their emergence is associated with the relations of capitalism; it
has been the historical development of capitalism -- more specifically,
its free-labor system -- that has allowed large numbers of men and women
in the late twentieth century to call themselves gay, to see themselves as
part of a community of similar men and women, and to organize politically
on the basis of that identity.... Only when individuals began to make
their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent
family unit was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a
personal identity -- an identity based on an ability to remain outside the
heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction
to one's own sex."
Best, Dale
_______________________________________________________________________________
Dale Carrico | dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
University of California at Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric
_______________________________________________________________________________
If you want to tell people the truth be sure to make them laugh.
Otherwise, they will kill you. -- George Bernard Shaw
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State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. -- Nietzsche
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