How It All Got Started
I’m Coming Out
Sex freaks us out. Why? Sex has been around for a long time, but the way we talk about sex changes with every generation. First of all, there’s the use of the word “sex” to refer to whether a person has the primary and secondary sex characteristics of a man or a woman.
This word, partially at the urging of queer theorists, has been separated from “gender”—the term that’s used to talk about what the societal expectations are for men and women in a a given culture, from having long hair (read: I’m a pretty girl) to gettin’ in bar brawls (read: I’m a tough guy). See our “Buzzwords” section for more on the differences between sex and gender.
Now that our “fun with English” lesson is out of the way, we can get down to the nitty gritty about queer theory’s contributions to a theory of human sexuality. (Ooh, ahh.) See, the way the Victorians talked about sex set in place categories of “normal” sexual behavior that persist even today, despite our courageous queer theorists’ best efforts.
The Victorians are the ones who invented the term homosexual, and this word came to mean a person who is abnormal and sick-in-the-head. He did what with the milkman? was always the implication behind that word-as-attack. And before long, sexual orientation became a topic of public discussion.
Fops and Other Fancy Boys
With the very public trials of Oscar Wilde—a wildly popular playwright, novelist and socialite—all of late Victorian England got to see what a real homosexual looks and acts like. As Oscar Wilde was witty, educated, theatrical, defiant, manicured, upper class, the public came to believe that these were essential traits of “homosexuals.”
At that time, these same traits were associated with the aristocracy that was quickly falling out of fashion. The newly powerful working class of the Victorian Era associated old aristocracies with lazy, fancy, men of leisure. So these manly men-of-the-people wanted to make an example of Mr. Wilde.
And why wouldn’t the jury oblige them? It was so easy to charge Oscar Wilde with the crime of having sex with men (it was a serious crime). The implication was: Real men don’t wear nice clothes and kiss boys; real men shovel coal into steam engines and fight with bare knuckles.
Are you starting to see how forcing people into categories like manly men and feminine women can go hand-in-hand with oppressive discourses on sexuality? Say “yes.”
We’re here to tell you that two World Wars didn’t help break down what it meant to be a manly man in England, the U.S., or elsewhere—which included both killing people and sleeping with as many women as possible, of course. In war, men are required to be more macho.
Of course, we needed a few good men to fight a few nasty Germans. Guys who read poetry and wore clean socks weren’t wanted in the army’s rough-and-tumble ranks. Cracks in this dominant paradigm of gender, sex, and sexuality start to become visible in the late fifties with the Beat Poetry Movement.
Just Beat It, Traditional Sex Categories
Allen Ginsberg, a self-proclaimed queer man, shocked post-war America with his (in)famous Beat poem, “Howl.” This work publically mentions homosexuality, and generally attempts to describe the oppressive conditions of the “boys will be boys,” “Keeping up with the Joneses” culture of World War II.
And gee, did that poem ruffle a lot of feathers. But it sure made him a lot of cool friends, too.
Then came the 1960s or, if you like, the nineteen sexties. We were sick of war. Men wanted to be peaceful and put flowers in their long hair and express themselves sexually if they so pleased. And women wanted the same basic rights.
Authority of any kind was in question at that time. Feminists questioned why their bodies were being defined, dressed, and regulated by men. Bras got burned, and the Pill came into widespread use, thereby busting sex once again out of the bedroom and into public view.
Then in 1976, the American Psychiatric Association changed its view on homosexuality; they decided it would no longer be deemed a mental illness. Time to party, Shmoopsters.
Until the '80s, that is. HIV/AIDS stopped the celebration cold, and as the '80s turned into the early '90s, political struggle once again became the name of the game. In our humble opinions, that’s when the modern “queer” was born.
Queer Nation, an activist magazine, and ACT UP, an activist group, took the term “queer” and turned it into a political weapon. That’s when the LGBT community formed really powerful political and social alliances that continue to this day. From within this newly acquired space of influence, Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble, and queer theory proper was born.
Butler used Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality as one of her inspirations. It was time to put the Victorians on trial. The rest of us were tired of being oppressed, yo.