The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 6 of 8
Homosexuality began to recede as a possibility inherent in most men and congeal into a condition specific to some: The gays became more visible and sorted themselves out from the straights.
"When we dismantle an oppressive system, we liberate both the oppressor and the oppressed."
Progressives have often argued that oppressive systems hurt both the oppressor and the oppressed, but perhaps Paulo Freire put it best.
When looking for examples, the gay liberation movement offers one of the clearest cases.
Back in 1903 Sigmund Freud had suggested that homosexuality represented arrested sexual development, and it was implied that everyone went through a homosexual phase of development. Thereafter, for 70 years, all men were potential homosexuals. Some of the exaggerated masculine posturing of the mid-20th century might have been in reaction to the widespread reverence that was given to some of Freud's theories. Certain writers, such as Ernest Hemmingway and Norman Mailer, wrote in conscious opposition to the dominance that Freud's views had in the mid 20th Century. If you accuse every man of being homosexual, and you define this as a form of failure, then every man must make an effort to prove they are straight.
In her book, Barbara Ehrenreich documents the emergence, during the 1970s, of the gays as a separate identity, and the relief this offered straight men, who suddenly had less to prove, both because homosexuality was no longer seen as a failure, and also because it was seen as it's own niche, rather than a universal experience of development.
Gay liberation liberated the straights as much it liberated the gays. It started a process that over a few decades has granted each person more and more authority to define their identity however they want. If the mid-20th Century is remembered for stifling conformity, we should give credit to the queers for helping us escape from that straightjacket. Eccentrics have an easier time today than they did then.
Having said that, I'd like to go off script for a bit, and talk about all of the ways the movement of personal liberation remains partial and incomplete.
The USA, like most societies, has a history of partial revolutions. These are transformations that educate us about the wide open possibilities for further emancipation, yet fail to get us there.
In the USA, the social penalty for being gay has faded, but the economic realities have undercut sexual freedom. Having one's own apartment is a powerful circumstance that allows the exploration of one's sexuality, yet having one's own apartment has become difficult after several decades when the average rent as risen faster than the average wage. Indeed, the peak year for the ratio of average wage to average rent was actually back in 1958 (which, by no coincidence, was also the peak year of the Baby Boom -- that young heterosexual men had such an easy time getting their own apartment was a major reason why they were able to start families that year).
Back in 1929 Virginia Woolf published her essay "A Room of One's Own" in which she comments:
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
That remains true today, and it remains true of sex even more so than anything else. A safe space that one fully controls is an empowering catalyst for the exploration of one's personal identity. If we can imagine a world where everyone gets their own apartment at age 18, then we can more easily imagine a world where people can develop their full autonomous selves. By contrast, the world we live in, where people are stuck with housemate into their 20s and even their 30s, is a world in which people are kept too crowded and too busy to ever discover who they actually are.
So we've seen a partial, incomplete, and now half-undone revolution. The social penalty for being gay has weakened, but the economic factors that might allow true sexual freedom have retrogressed. Our employer won't fire us if we come as gay, but our housemates might try to evict us if we have loud sex. Rising rent has undermined the circumstances that would make these new rights real.
But having added that very large qualifier, it still remains true that the progress of the LGBT community since the 1960s counts as progress for human emancipation.
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
Page 128-129
The qualities now claimed for the authentic male self - sensitivity, emotional lability, a capacity for self-indulgence, even unpredictability - were still, and despite the feminist campaign to the contrary, recognizably “feminine.” How much could a man transform himself, in the name of androgynous progress, without ceasing to be, as Goldberg put it, “all male,” or visibly heterosexual? Sanctions against homosexuality had always defined the outer limit of male rebellion; and although these sanctions did ease slightly in the seventies, what was perhaps more important for the male revolt was that homosexuality began to recede as a possibility inherent in most men and congeal into a condition specific to some: The gays became more visible and sorted themselves out from the straights.
Dennis Altman writes that “two quite new and connected ways of looking at homosexuality came into being in the seventies: the concept of the alternative life style and that of a gay people or minority.” He describes the emergence of a distinct gay culture, with (on the male side anyway) not only gay bars and discos, but gay neighborhoods, publications and styles of dress. The “ethnicization” of gays was important to the cause of gay liberation. “After all,” Altman observes, “murderers are not usually seen as a minority, nor tuberculosis as a lifestyle.”
In the spirit of pluralism, cities such as New York and San Francisco could proclaim “gay pride weeks” - analogous to St. Patrick’s Day, Black History Week, and other nods to ethnic interest groups - and liberals could add “gay rights” to the long list of social democratic desiderata without having to think for a moment of the unsettling sexual possibilities posed by same-sex love. Polls in the mid-seventies showed an increased acceptance of homosexuality, now understood in consumerist terms as a “sexual preference” or as a “life-style” defined by certain goods and leisure options. In 1973 the medical community, represented by the American Psychiatric Association, dropped homosexuality from its list of diseases, and in other cicles as well, “faggot” began to lose some of its sting as the ultimate male insult.
How well the ethnicization of homosexuality will serve the cause of sexual liberation remains to be seen. For the men who profess to being gay, it means a new feeling of collective pride, a base for political activism, networks of sociability and support. It also means a heightened vulnerability. Visibly gay men in identifiably gay milieus are easy targets for random harassment or murder. As a “people,” they substitute for Jews in the hate literature of far-right groups - symbols of urban degeneracy, unearned pleasures, and defiance of all that is Christian and “natural.” But for the men who do not profess to being gay, the conceptual ghettoization of homosexuality has had a clearly liberating effect: The social deviant - who departs from standards of masculine maturity - is no longer an automatic suspect for sexual deviance.
Before gay liberation and before the seventies’ disillusionment with masculinity, male homosexuality could not be contained in any identifiable group of men. It was a diffuse possibility that haunted every man, a label that could be hurled against the man who was “irresponsible” as well as the one who was overtly “effeminate.” If few heterosexuals could claim to know a “practicing” homosexual, almost everyone knew someone suspected of being a latent one, and the notion of “latency” expanded homosexuality to an almost universal male potential.