The Gay/Lesbian Market
With the waving of the rainbow flag, the emergence of a vibrant gay and lesbian niche market is being heralded across the United States. A wide range of commodities and services aimed at gay and lesbian consumers are now advertised in an equally wide range of media and venues. Reproductions of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs in the New Yorker, Miller Beer ads in the Advocate, catalogues distributed nationally by gay-owned businesses, and websites "display" just a fraction of the new opportunities for consumption based in lesbian and gay identity.
The consolidation of gays and lesbians as a target market raises several questions. What does this market development have to do with the lesbian and gay political movement? Which came first, the movement or the market? Does the market exploit the movement, redirecting resources that would otherwise go to the movement? Or does the market assist the movement by proliferating and normalizing images of gay and lesbian citizens in the media? These are complicated questions, as are their answers. Interaction between gay and lesbian identity and market practices goes back over a hundred years. However, if the capitalist market has enabled the emergence of a gay identity and community, and if it has also enabled the growth of a gay-right movement (and I believe it has done both), the market has nonetheless begun, in the 1990s, to inhibit the progressive possibilities many activists once thought inherent in gay/lesbian identity and the gay/lesbian movement.
The market and the movement intersect at a number of points-in the budgets of nonprofit organizations, in the wallets of gay and lesbian people, in the domestic-partner policies of businesses, in corporat...
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... very young, we are rich, we have children, we are Republicans, we are married, we are socialists. Let us not beg for acceptance on the basis of normalcy or sameness. Let us not deny each other, and let us not be denied in the service of profit.
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Article copyright Sojourner Feminist Institute, Inc.
The persecution of homosexuals during this age of McCarthy proved exactly how vulnerable they were to attack and discrimination. Out of those persecutions came some of the first organized “gay rights” groups, known as Homophile organizations, the first two being the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilibis (who focused their efforts on Lesbian rights). Founded in 1950 by Harry Hay, the...
In Vicki L. Eaklor’s Queer America, the experiences of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people in the years since the 1970s gay liberation movement are described as a time of transformation and growth. The antigay movement, threatened, now more than ever, created numerous challenges and obstacles that are still prevalent today. Many of the important changes made associated with the movement were introduced through queer and queer allied individuals and groups involved in politics. Small victories such as the revision of the anti discrimination statement to include “sexual orientation”, new propositions regarding the Equal Rights Amendment and legalized abortion, were met in turn with growing animosity and resistance from individuals and groups opposed to liberal and
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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 have dedicated themselves in fighting for
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...n Duberman, and Martha Vicinus, eds. Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian past. New York: Penguin Group, 1990.
The question of whether there is free choice or whether we are subject to ordinary causality raises the issue of determinism in human conduct. Are we ultimately “determined” by our biology, heredity, environment, beliefs, and other conditioning factors, or whether we have “free will” to override any such determination? I agree with Blatchford and the theory that there is a cause for every wish and every choice a man acts from. I believe we are free to choose as heredity and environment cause us to choose.
Free will is the capacity of an individual to “act freely”, how what they do is/ isn’t controlled by any other power, as well as the notion that “every event has a cause” (Vaughn Pg. 333). While rationalizing about this idea, freewill presents a variety of different theories to explain why or why not an individual has the ability to change the outcome.
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Note: This paper has a very long Annotated Bibliography. In recent years, same-sex relationships have become more encompassing in US society. State legislation is changing such as accepting gay marriages, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and legal gay adoptions; the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community is becoming public. Gay-headed families, like heterosexuals, are diverse and varying in different forms.
Halwani, Raja, Gary Jaeger, James Stramel, Richard Nunan, William Wilkerson, and Timothy Murphy. What Is Gay and Lesbian Philosophy? 2008. MS. Oxford, UK. San Diego Mesa College Academic Databases. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. .
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