Homogenizing The Homosexual Essays - Same-sex Sexuality,

Homogenizing The Homosexual On a hot June night in 1969 the sexual discourses of theology, law and psychology encountered resistance so strong that millions of lives were changed. In a small gay bar in New York, the regulars, an eclectic mix of drag queens, transexuals, effeminate men and butch women, offered up the most visible resistance ever witnessed to the relentless exercising of public power on their private lives. The three-day street riot, began by Stonewall patrons, spilled onto the front pages and television screens of a nation. The exposure placed the queen, queer and dyke in the living rooms, kitchens and supermarkets of straight America. The resistance of gays to the external and internal subjectification of themselves as sinners, sodomites and psychopaths began. Before this seminal event, gays were known, but their lives operated in the back streets and alleyways of urban life. They were invisible to mainstream North Americans and expected to stay in the shadows where their deviant bodies belonged. The patrons of the Stonewall bar lived at the precipice of gay life. Their adoption of cross dressing was an affront to prevailing sexual norms. Women in suits and men in scarves and chiffon were the most identifiable of deviants and they relished their disobedience. Strutting through urban nights they gleefully thumbed their noses at the heterosexual world. They embraced every stereotype and took the constitution of the gay subject to extremes. The visibility of these men and women made them easy targets for random displays of force by police. Haphazard attacks on gay bars and clubs instilled fear of the unknown. The visible cared little about the repercussions of these raids for they had nothing to lose. For this they were shunned by their gay brethren who viewed them as circus sideshow freaks. These queens, queers and dykes were dangerous. Their openness put ?average' gays at risk. The physical and verbal abuse by police, abandonment by families and lack of social opportunity experience by the most identifiable queers kept most of North America's gays firmly underground. Under the guises of religion, law and science, power was being exercised to keep gays marginalized and hidden. Most happily acquiesced. With the fear of verbal, physical or social reprisals looming large, they became prisoners of their own making in Michel Foucault's vision of panoptic power. Invisible gays continually surveyed themselves for any outward signs of their sin that would lead to public detection. With only the images and words of repressive discourses to constitute themselves, the invisible queers, internalized disgust and spent their lives under constant self-surveillance. These stifling conditions ignited the need for the relation of power between straights and gays to shift focus. Near domination and the excessive uses of force were producing an entropic situation in need of diversion to a more productive state. Stonewall provided the necessary response. Three nights of fighting, shouting and revelry that confounded police commanded the immediate attention of heterosexuals everywhere. More importantly it garnered the ?freaks' the respect and admiration of the millions of silent women and men across North America. For gays, a movement was being born and a new, more productive power structure was emerging. In the aftermath of Stonewall, many gays felt empowered to go public and change the repressive statutes that governed their lives. Collectively, the truth that they were not deviants to be beaten, souls to be saved or in need of psychiatry materialized. Nothing was wrong with their psychological or spiritual states. Claims of normalcy were becoming self evident through the eyes of the new scientific discourse of biology. No blame was to be laid nor pity bestowed, nature had made them. The prescience of this biological discourse laid the fertile ground for the exercising of Foucault's bio power upon the gay subject. The reduction of fear and militancy generated by the rioters helped to usher in the ascent of bio power. By giving gays the courage, legitimacy and collective will to move out of the shadows, Stonewall's riots gave bio power access to the private lives of gays. If their sexual nature was blameless then remaining cloaked kept them from participating as productive social beings. Out in the open bio power could classify, subjectify, survey and normalize the modern gay. To produce