The Use Of Identity Experimentation By Robert Graves

Andrew Sullivan, author of, What is a Homosexual, portrays his experience growing up; trapped in his own identity. He paints a detailed portrait of the hardships caused by being homosexual. He explains the struggle of self-concealment, and how doing so is vital for social acceptation. The ability to hide one’s true feelings make it easier to be “invisible” as Sullivan puts it. “The experience of growing up profoundly different in emotional and psychological makeup inevitably alters a person’s self-perception.”(Sullivan)This statement marks one of the many reasons for this concealment. The main idea of this passage is to reflect on those hardships, and too understand true self-conscious difference. Being different can cause identity

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, society wasn’t the most accepting of places for people who were different from the “social norms”. Now I know, people today still struggle with trying to fit in and be “normal” but it was different. Being a gay man living in San Fransisco at the time, which had a large gay population, Richard Rodriguez had a hard time dealing with the discrimination he faced. Richard Rodriguez was an American journalist who wrote and published a memoir about his life as a gay man. In October of 1990, Rodriguez published his memoir “Late Victorians” in Harper’s Magazine, a critically acclaimed publication of the time. In his memoir, Rodriguez describes what it was like to realize he was gay and watch as the country changed to become a more accepting place. He does this by setting up how things can change and then explaining the actual ways things change for the gay population.

Life for most homosexuals during the first half of the Twentieth century was one of hiding, being ever so careful to not give away their true feelings and predilections. Although the 1920s saw a brief moment of openness in American society, that was quickly destroyed with the progress of the Cold War, and by default, that of McCarthyism. The homosexuals of the 50s “felt the heavy weight of medical prejudice, police harassment and church condemnation … [and] were not able to challenge these authorities.” They were constantly battered, both physically and emotionally, by the society that surrounded them. The very mention or rumor of one’s homosexuality could lead to the loss of their family, their livelihood and, in some cases, their

Thomas Rogers’s essay deals with the struggles he felt about his identity as a gay man and how it intersected with his identity as an athlete, albeit one who was less innately talented than his older sister. Upon arriving in college, he makes a difficult decision: ultimately, he chooses to quit the rowing team after a particularly humiliating and homoerotic hazing incident involving oil. “They had

Justin Cook is a student at Stanton College Preparatory who is currently in the eleventh grade. Cook is enrolled in an AP Psychology and takes a great interest in connecting the work he does in the class to the work in his other current classes. In this essay, Cook presents his argument on why homosexuals should be permitted to serve in the American Armed Forces primarily from a psychological standpoint. Cook is an active advocate for human rights and the equality of homosexuals. He is also an active supporter of The Trevor Project which is the only American non-profit organization that runs a 24/7 suicide and crisis prevention helpline for gay and questioning youth.

He attempts to squander the idea that every aspect regarding the troops were pleasant and agreeable. The system was not free from prejudice and discrimination. Minorities in the military was unpleasant, several black soldiers were killed or wounded for trying to integrate army facilities. “Others received dishonorable discharges for resisting discrimination.” Racist white MPs beat up black soldiers and white girls caught together. Jim crow was a part of the dominant military culture. Gay men in military were frowned upon during the war, according to Adams this is an understatement. Men who were caught and found guilty of homosexual acts received dishonorable discharges, which stopped them from getting veterans’ benefits and career advancement in Civilian Society. Sometimes those who were caught received heavy prison sentences or put in stockades where MPs often abused them. The pursuit to punish homosexuals wasted time and resources. The chapter features the events on the on the impact of America in World war II and the treatment of blacks, Indians, minority groups, women, and homosexuals in the military. He claims there are many myths surrounding World War II. Even Though, the achievement of the American War Machine was remarkable it was not the only factor in allied victory.  He dispels the idea that this era was a “golden era,” and does

“Sex was something mysterious which happened to married couples and Homosexuality was never mentioned; my mother told me my father did not believe it existed at all ‘until he joined the army’. As a child, I was warned about talking to ‘strange men’, without any real idea what this meant. I was left to find out for myself what it was all about.” Mike Newman, who was a child during the 1950s America recalls how homosexuality was perceived during the post-World War II era (F). This sexual oppression was not only in Newman’s household, but in almost everyone’s. While the civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s and ended late 1960s, the LGBT community started to come out of the closet slowly. The gay rights movement stemmed from the civil rights movement

Post-World War II, everyday gay life and consciousness transformed. The war stressed the segue from connecting gender inversion with sexual non-conformity to constructing and adhering to the binarism between homosexual and heterosexual identities. The pre-war notion that anyone could capitulate to homosexual temptations was replaced by the omnipresent fear of contracting and developing homosexuality as an indeterminate hybrid of both illness and mental disorder. A homosexual was considered and regarded as a security risk to the sanctity of a functioning society. The diaries of Donald Vining and Martin Duberman, both well-educated gay men working within academia, shed light on the lives and consciousness of gay men in the years following the end of World War II. As they both recount, the post-war years witnessed widespread fear, policing, and marginalization of homosexuals, and this resulted not simply from the construction of homosexuality as an entity separate from gender. Rather, this marginalization stemmed largely from the recognition that homosexuality, in the way that it was expressed by gay men such as Vining and Duberman, defied the constraints that constituted the heterosexual paradigm of relationships.

Two Diaries, Donald Vining’s A Gay Diary Vol. Two and Martin Duberman’s Gay in the Fifties look into the everyday life of gay males in the post-World War II Era. While World War II increased freedom for men to sexually explore within the male community, post-World War II extended the freedom of exploration but also created a subsequent backlash against homosexual practices. Vining and Duberman’s diaries document an extension of gay freedoms in the post-World War II period. Although Vining and Duberman give contrasting accounts of their lives as gay males in the postwar period, common themes could be drawn in the form of friendships, sexual activity, relationships, and backlash by heteronormative society.

George Chauncey’s Gay New York Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, goes where no other historian had gone before, and that is into the world of homosexuality before World War II. Chauncey’s 1994 critically acclaimed book was a gender history breakthrough that gave light to a homosexual subculture in New York City. The author argues against the idea that homosexual men lived hidden away from the world. Chauncey’s book exposes an abundant culture throughout the United States, especially in New York. In this book Chauncey not only shows how the gay population existed, but “uncovers three widespread myths about the history of gay life before the rise of the gay movement which was isolation, invisibility, and internalization.” Chauncey argues against these theories that in the years 1890-1940, America had in fact a large gay culture. Chauncey book is impactful in the uncovering of a lost culture, but also works as an urban pre-World War II history giving an inside view of life in the city through sexuality and class.

Despite the dearth of available literature due to censorship and the passage of time, this period was characterized by flourishing deviant—and provisionally—queer sexuality. The unstable times, cultural changes, and political turmoil all lent themselves to a shift in discussions and understandings of sexuality. The Civil War remains a period of incredible upheaval that profoundly shaped culture and society. This period saw the reshaping of gender and sexuality norms while also instigating the codifying of existing gender-based oppression and violences (Bronsky, 81). While the lexicon of sexuality has changed in the intervening years, the Civil War (and the circumstances it produced) remains a condition of emergence of queer pre-history, as well as a crucial site for interpreting and reclaiming historical

Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. (hb). ISBN: 0-226-35471-7.

In the past decades, the struggle for gay rights in the Unites States has taken many forms. Previously, homosexuality was viewed as immoral. Many people also viewed it as pathologic because the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a psychiatric disorder. As a result, many people remained in ‘the closet’ because they were afraid of losing their jobs or being discriminated against in the society. According to David Allyn, though most gays could pass in the heterosexual world, they tended to live in fear and lies because they could not look towards their families for support. At the same time, openly gay establishments were often shut down to keep openly gay people under close scrutiny (Allyn 146). But since the 1960s, people

Within modern-day America, there are certain societal standards based on sexual relationships. Within the poem, the narrator, a young woman, questions why she has to “wear the brand of shame; /whilst he amid the gay and proud/still bears an honored name” (Harper 26-28). Within her poem, Harper exposes the hypocrisy of the

Queer theory questions creations of normal and divergent, insider, and outsider.2 Queer theorists analyse a situation or a text to determine the relationship between sexuality, power and gender. Queer theory challenges basic tropes used to organize our society and our language: even words are gendered, and through that gendering an elliptical view of the hierarchy of society, and presumption of what is male and what is female, shines through. Queer theory rejects such binary distinctions as arbitrarily determined and defined by those with social power. It works to deconstruct these binaries, particularly the homosexual/heterosexual binary.4