Gay male culture Essay Example for Free

comical male shade quizAmerican elaboration has focused oftentimes more heavily on zippy work force than on other members of the LGBT club. This may be due to larger numbers of men than women and it may also be due to gay men having more resources available to them to justify, explore and perform their sexuality. The western nuance as a whole still sees men and male experience as the central experience in culture, even if the men in question atomic number 18 transgressing established grammatical gender norms.Gay culture relies upon enigma symbols and codes woven into an overall straight context. The association of gay men with opera, ballet, professional sports, , medicamental theater, the Golden advance of Hollywood, and interior design began with wealthy mansexual men using the straight themes of these media to send their own signals. In the Marilyn Monroe film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical filmfreakcentral. net number features a woman singing while muscled m en in revealing costumes dance around her.The mens costumes were designed by a man, the dance was choreographed by a man, and the dancers seem more elicit in each other than in the female star, nevertheless her reassure presence gets the sequence past the censors and fits it into an overall heterocentric theme. Today gay male culture is publicly acknowledged. Celebrities much(prenominal) as Liza Minnelli spent topix. net a significant amount of their social time with urban gay men, who were now normally viewed as sophisticated and stylish by the jet set. Celebrities themselves were open about their relationships.Gay men cant be identified by the way they look or what kind of music they like. on that point atomic number 18 gay men in every field and all sorts of fashions and music. Lesbian culture A homosexual is a woman who is romantically and sexually attracted solo to other women. The history of lesbian culture over the last half-century has been linked to the evolution o f feminism. Older stereotypes of lesbian women stressed a wave-particle duality in the midst of women who adhered to stereotypical male gender stereotypes ( dyke) and stereotypical female gender stereotypes (femme), and that typical lesbian couples consisted of butch/femme couples.Today, some lesbian women adhere to being either butch or femme, but these categories are much less rigid and there is no express expectation that a lesbian couple be butch/femme. There is a sub-culture within the lesbian community called Aristasia, where lesbians in the community adhere to mis declare levels of femininity. In this culture, there are two genders, blonde and brunette, although they are unrelated to actual hair color. Brunettes are femme, yet blondes are even more so. Also notable are diesel dykes, extremely butch women who use male forms of dress and behavior, and who often work as truck drivers.Lipstick lesbian refers to womanly women who are attracted only to other feminine women. Bise xual culture In modern western culture Bisexual mint are in the peculiar situation of receiving hatred or distrust Lunde 1990 or even outright denial of their existence from some elements of both(prenominal) the straight and lesbian and gay populations. There is of course some element of general anti-LGBT feeling, but some volume insist that bisexual hatful are unsure of their true feelings, that they are experimenting or going through a phase and that they ultimately will or should decide or discover which (singular) sex they are sexually attracted to.One popular misconception is that Lunde 1990 bisexuals suffer all humans sexually attractive. That is no truer than the idea that, say, all straight men would find all women sexually attractive. More hatful of all kinds are becoming aware that there are some people who find attractive sexual partners among both men and women sometimes equally, sometimes favoring genius sex in particular . Distinctions exist between sexual ori entation (attraction, inclination, preference, or desire), gender identicalness (self-identification or self-concept) and sexual behavior (the sex of champions actual sexual partners).For example, some wholeness who may find people of either sex attractive might in practice have relationships only with people of one particular sex. Many bisexual people consider themselves to be part of the LGBT or Queer community Barris, 2007. In an effort to create both more visibility, and a symbol for the bisexual community to cockle behind, Michael Page created the bisexual pride flag. The bisexual flag, which has a pink or red stripe at the top for quirk, a blue one on the bottom for heterosexuality and a purple one in the middle to represent bisexuality, as purple is from the combination of red and blue Lunde 1990.Transgender culture The poll of transgender culture is complicated by the many and various ways in which cultures deal with gender hrc. org. For example, in many cultures, peopl e who are attracted to people of the same sex that is those who in contemporary westerly culture would identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are classed as a third gender, together with people who would in the West be classified as transgender or transsexual.Also in the contemporary West, there are usually hrc.org several different groups of transgender and transsexual people, some of which are extremely exclusive, like groups only for transsexual women who explicitly want sex reassignment surgery or male, heterosexual only cross-dressers. Transmens groups are often, but not always, more inclusive. Groups aiming at all transgender people, both transmen and transwomen, have in most cases appeared only in the last few years. Some transgender or transsexual women and men however do not divide as being part of any specific trans culture.However there is a distinction between transgender and transsexual people who make their past known to others . Some wish to live according to their gender identity and not reveal this past, stating that they should be able to live in their true gender entertainmentction in a normal way, and be in control of whom they choose to tell their past to. Epistemology of the closet.The conceptualisation being in the closet is used to describe keeping secret ones sexual behavior or orientation, most commonly homosexuality or bisexuality, but also including the gender identity of transgender and transsexual people branconolilas.no. sapo. pt. Being in the closet is more than being private, it is a life-shaping pattern of concealment where gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender individuals inter their sexuality/gender-identity in the most consequential areas of life, with family, friends, and at work. Individuals may marry or avoid plastered jobs in order to avoid suspicion and exposure.Some will even claim to be heterosexual when asked directly. It is the power of the closet to shape the core of an individuals life that has made hom osexuality into a significant personal, social, and policy-making drama in twentieth-century America.(Seidman 2003, p. 25). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her book Epistemology of the closet, majorly focuses on male homosexuality. She is also an intellectual who is interested in gay and lesbian studies, grotesque studies, gender studies, and feminism. Sedgwick (Seidman 2003, p. 25) proposes that many of the major thoughts and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structuredindeed fracturedby the now endemical crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century.Incoherent ideas about homosexuality inform the way men are acculturated in the modern West, and (Seidman 2003, p. 25) since this is so, this incoherence has come to mark society generally. incoherence characterizes the attitude toward homosexuality in the West and is beyond debate. examples, are gay men ridiculous figures of fun or are they sexual mon sters who prey on young children? is the homosexual a limp-wrested effeminate discrepant for the armed forces, or the lothario of the showers who will gaze upon and/or rape his fellow servicemen? Is sexuality an orientation or is it a choice? are homosexuals born or are they made? essentialism or social constructionism? temper/nurture?. These are all part of the effect of this crisis in modern sexual definition. Sedgwick believes that it is impossible to dissolve between these (Seidman 2003, p. 25). In describing in general terms the mass of contradictions that adhere to homosexuality, she proposes that one consider it in terms of an op view between a minoritizing view and a universalizing one. A minoritizing view takes the position that homosexuality is of primary importance to a relatively small group of actual homosexuals.A universalizing view takes the position that homosexuality is of importance to persons across a wide range of sexualities. Under the universalizing view, one can compose nurture, social-construction, choice and a warrant for social engineering to eradicate homosexuality(Seidman 2003, p. 25). Sedgwick says that the current debate in queer theory, between constructivist and essentialist understandings of homosexuality is the most recent link(Seidman 2003, p. 25). She goes on to conclude that the continuation of this debate is itself the most important feature of recent understandings of sex.The aim of the book is to explore the incoherent dispensation under which we now live. Through an mental testing of a number of mostly late nineteenth century literary and philosophical works, including (Seidman 2003, p. 25).Melvilles BILLY BUDD, Wildes THE sketch OF DORIAN GRAY, various works of Nietzsche, James THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE, Thackerays LOVEL THE WIDOWER, and Prousts REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, Sedgwick discovers a number of pairs of opponent terms (binarisms) which she then shows to be inconsistent with and dependent upon each other .I found it fascinating to notice her explication of the ways in which these terms were related. Among the pairings that she assembles and dissects for our consideration are secrecy/disclosure, private/public, masculine/feminine, majority/minority, white/initiation, natural/artificial, new/old, growth/decadence, urbane/provincial, health/illness, same/different, cognition/paranoia, art/kitsch, sincerity/sentimentality, and voluntarity/ habituation (Seidman 2003, p.25).She asserts that a true understanding of the force of the opposition of these terms must be grounded in the actualization and acceptance that the content of all of these terms was determined around the turn of the century amid and through spooky questioning over who and what was homosexual. These opposing terms, all of which operate today, therefore have a residue of the homo/hetero definitional crisis(Seidman 2003, p.25). In addition, Sedgwick perhaps delivers the coup de grace(Seidman 2003, p. 25), if such was nee ded, to sleek, masculine, modernist objective criticism. She demonstrates that modernist criticism finds its genesis in the homo/hetero definitional crisis and both its flight into and prizing of abstraction is a direct reflection of its homophobia.