Beka > Recent Status Updates

"When I came out in the 70s, I could not help but feel alone, isolated, marginalized. While I knew there was a gay rights movement, the pervasive silence of the larger public world kept me from finding it easily, mired as I was in my overpowering sense of difference + aloneness in that difference. Now, that awful closet of isolation + invisibility has been replaced by the wide-open door of public recognition."

"For women, writers like Dorothy Allison + Alice Walker used the experiences of feminist fiction writers to write the stories of lesbian women, + unlike gay male fiction, which often portrayed the sexualized worlds of gay men in the 1970s, lesbian fiction was often a form of social criticism + took a more politicized stance than gay male fiction."

FASCINATING

"In the 21st century United States, visibility happens through the media.
One of the primary reasons for the revolution in mainstream media was the development of queer film, plays, music, + literature. As queers began coming out, forming communities, + making culture, many rebelled against the mainstream media that excluded their work + their representations of queerness, + went on to form alternative media."

"It's pointless to argue when the first gay character appeared on television, because the definition of queer representation has radically changed over time. In the 1920s, queerness was about gender play, in the 1980s, it was about sexual identity."

"Raymond Chan, Risa Brooks et al (1998) found that lesbian co-mothers shared childcare tasks more equally than heterosexual parents + that more egalitarian couples were also more satisfied with their relationships.

Likewise, Sullivan found that lesbian co-parents tended to perform equal childcare duties + enjoy equal status in the home as long as both remained employed."

"...research on how queer couples + coparents share household duties + expenses is a thriving enterprise, assessing the great gay hope that their relationships are more egalitarian + just than heterosexual ones.

The record thus far provides grounds for both self-congratulations + caution."

"Studies of the division of domestic labor + power have become a major area of sociological research ever since feminists focused attention on the politics of housework.

Because same-sex couples offer an exceptional social laboratory for gender theory + practice, research on how queer couples + coparents share household duties + expenses is a thriving enterprise..."

Or, as Graff puts it, bemoaning her own lack of legal status as a potential co-parent, "if a dead man, or an uncle, or an absent cuckold, or a holy ghost, or a sperm-bank-supplemented husband can be a sociological 'father,' why can't I?"

"Lesbian co-mothers studied, for example, seem to have higher parenting skills than heterosexual stepfathers. But is this related to their sexual orientation, gender, or other factors? Do gay fathers parent any differently than dads in general, and, if so, why? Would the findings be the same if more racially diverse queer populations were included?"

"Given the social + economic requisites involved, lesbians (+ especially gay men) who choose to become parents tend to be older + better educated than parents in general, + more often reside in urban settings. Such queer parents are also more likely to be white + comparatively affluent."

"It should seem self-evident to all but the most biased observer that more heterosexual parents, as well as the dominant culture, are likely to attempt to influence their children to follow in their heterosexual footsteps than are gay parents to deliberately 'bring their kids up gay'."

This is evidenced by the gross insistence of some people to ask kindergarten boys if they have a girlfriend yet, + vice versa.

"...Researchers report findings that some might find perverse, defensively claiming that children of gay + lesbian parents turn out to be heterosexual in virtually the same proportion as those raised by heterosexual parents.

Moreover, should the day in fact come when homosexuality is no longer stigmatized, would it matter anyway how many kids did turn out to be gay?"

"Multihousehold support networks, the blending of selected biological + chosen kin, + early lesbian experiments in planned parenthood via donor insemination were but some of the 'chosen' family forms investigated by Kath Weston."

"The notion of 'families we choose' challenges essentialost understandings of kinship.

Kath Weston identified the widespread gay experience of rejection by families of origin + the need to construct alternative support structures as foundational to the creativity with which lesbians + gay men began structuring their own families of choice during the last decades of the 20th century."

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"Now that there is no consensus on the form a normal family should assume, every kind of family has become an alternative family.
Lesbigay or queer families occupy pride of place in this cultural smorgasbord which includes familiar varieties that were historically most prevalent among the poor --such as stepfamilies, unwed motherhood, blended families, binational families, divorce-extended families..."

"The patriarchal bargain of the modern family order --in which women subordinated their individual interests to those of husband's + children in exchange for economic support + social respectability-- would soon unravel... while feminist + gay Liberation movements spurred women + men to question received understandings of gender, sexuality, + family life..."

"Indeed, in recent years we have seen a restigmatizing of single women + single mothers --protrayed as either pathetically lonely career gals gone sour or as a cancer in the body of domesticity, creating social havoc through reckless child rewarding + neglectful daycare.

While feminists pushed legislation to make it easier to leave marriages, the push now is to make it more difficult."

"Indeed, marriage was built and organized as a means to institutionalize + enforce very particular + unequal divisions of gender, property, + childcare --divisions that both assumed + attempted to enforce female responsibility for childcare, food production, home maintenance, + male responsibility for mediating the outside world through wage labor + property ownership."

"The debates about assimilation (of minority groups) are as old as the movement itself.

Indeed, every social movement has at some point been faced with similar questions, questions about the benefits of assimilation into the dominant order vs the elaboration of visionary alternatives to that order."

"Yet, unfortunately, the processes of assimilation + cultural visibility are not solely beneficent. History has shown us -with horrifying detail- the ways in which forms of bigotry sustain themselves + even grow in the face of assimilation.

Never have we had so many openly gay elected officials, or so many antigay initiatives."

"But if gays seem like the paragons of trendiness, then they are being simultaneously depicted as the very anti-Christ, then sign of a culture in decay, a society in ruins, the perverse eclipse of rational modernity. As religious fundamentalism grows, becomes mainstream + legitimate, so too does hard-edged homophobia. Hate crimes are on the rise - not just in pure numbers but in the severity + brutality of the acts."

"...but since the 1970s and, for the first time in U.S. history, queers have not had to lead double lives & they are now able to bring their relationships & their queerness together to form new kinds of families.

For the first time in history, queers now have their same-sex relationships & their radically reconfigured families recognized socially & legally."

"As for families with children, queers have always had children, since most queers lived in socially sanctioned marriages until the 2nd half of the 20th century. Until this time, queers had to lead double lives, by which we mean that queers performed 'straight' roles in heterosexual relationships, marriages, + families while simultaneously participating in a second 'queer world.'"

"Before, during, and after World War II, queers met potential lovers surreptitiously in working-class bars, which were frequently subjected to police raids and arrests.

The 1960s feminist and gay Liberation movements threw off the shackles of repression that characterized the 1950s, giving rise to a veritable cornucopia of choices, images, and info about queer sex and sexuality."

Aww, just finished the chapter/article on gay black men in Harlem -- I loved reading the various perspectives and awakenings to their multilayered selves.