GinNJuice said:
LOL....
.... Do you get where I'm going with this? You weren't having sex on stage, and you weren't singing about gay issues, so it doesn't seem appropriate to add "Gay" in your title...
Unless, you agree with Hans that it was "a social organistion for people to mix with their own type"..... is that the case?
Oh brother. Are you really this clueless?
Here is the way it works. The dominant culture oppresses and marginalizes minority populations by disempowering them. It does this through a variety of means. It uses explicit means -- like poll taxes and formal segregation with black people, disenfranchising women, making it illegal for gay people to even assemble, much less have sex with one another.
But it operates more subtely too. The dom culture eliminates the history of the group from its official record. Thus, until 40 years ago, you could not pick up a text book and find any significant mention of black people who made any important contribution to American culture. Ditto for women. Now you can't find any mention of gay people who made significant contributions. Indeed, the gay rights struggle, an important social movement in America, isn't even taught.
Of course, members of the dom culture argue -- just as they are here -- that there should be no "special" history, no special mention of the contributions of these minorities because, after all, we are all Americans. Ironically, though, by the very effort of marginalizing populations -- by forcing them into ghettoes and closets -- the dom culture actually sows the seeds of alternative cultures. By not admitting them to the main culture, they invite the formation of rebellious alternative cultures.
The dilemma of the minority member then becomes, as a person denied access to the privileges of the dom culture, to find his identity within his group. This means uncovering the heritage that is the source of his or her oppression. For black people, it meant penetrating the wall of slavery -- to confront the fact that they were brought here illegally and to rediscover their origins, which are quite different from that of the nation's white religious settlers. For women, in the '60s, it meant penetrating the wall of partriarchal domination of the body -- of finding ownership and autonomy in their own bodies. For gay people, it meant penetrating the wall of the closet, likewise claiming ownership of the body's erotic desire.
In this effort, we came together and created explosive alternative cultures. The idea of black or gay pride is necessitated by the generations-long effort by the dominant culture not merely to oppress but to disappear minorities behind the phony argument of assimilation -- even as they are denied equality. This lives today in don't ask/don't tell. GEt back in the closet. And what has the result been? A radical increase in discharges for homosexuality. Scratch an assimilationist and you'll find a segregationist trying to look polite.
Most of you are far too young to have any idea of what it was like to have grown up being told you are second-rate, to have no legal right to love whom you choose, to be threatened with imprisonment just for going to a bar and drinking with people like yourself, to be subject to court committal to a state mental hospital because you love members of your own gender, to live continually under the threat of violence, to have to hide the fundamental facts of your life from your own family. Sounds lke a totalitarian state, doesn't it? Well, for gay people it was -- as it was for black people until the '60s.
So, try to imagine what it was like if you were 20 years old, from a world where gay people weren't even allowed to assemble, and you land in San Francisco and you see several hundred men defying stupid laws by standing up and singing, identifying themselves openly as gay. Imagine what it was like for those of us who wanted to be writers but had been told we could never write about our own lives. So we founded our own magazines because the mainstream wouldn't publish us. It was earth-shattering for us.
You don't understand this because you have utterly NO sense of what it is like to be pursued, oppressed and hated in America. It is grotesque trivialization and completely ignorant of the actual status of gay people in America -- read your own words, for god's sake -- to say that a gay cultural identity is not necessary. You don't offer participation in the mainstream. You offer at best tolerance as long as we disappear the things that make us different.
To deny the development of alternative cultures makes as much sense as saying that the relgiously persecuted had no right to establish a separate culture over 200 years ago -- namely the United States of America.
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That seems like gay discrimination to me.
It shows what kind of person you really are.
