Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship by Kath Weston

Author:Kath Weston [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-28T14:58:00+00:00

FROM FRIENDSHIP TO COMMUNITY

Among lesbians and gay men the term "community" (like coming out) has become as multifaceted in meaning as it is ubiquitous. In context, community can refer to the historical appearance of gay institutions, the totality of self-defined lesbians and gay men, or unity and harmony predicated upon a common sexual identity. Older gay people generally considered the term an anachronism when applied to the period before the late i96os, since "community" came into popular usage only with the rise of a gay movement. I°

Often contrasted with "isolation," community subsumed one of the earlier senses of coming out: making a public debut at a gay bar. The area of overlap involved locating other gay people, a project that can remain surprisingly difficult in an era when homosexuality makes headline news. Toni Williams, who had grown up in a large metropolitan area and begun identifying as a lesbian only a few years before I interviewed her, insisted, "I didn't think that there was nobody that was going to be like me. But I didn't know where to search for that person. I didn't think that there was a community."

Finding community, as one man very eloquently put it, meant discovering "that your story isn't the only one in the world." Such a discovery need not entail meeting other gay people, but rather becoming convinced of their existence. Sean O'Brien, originally from New York City, used to listen to a weekly gay radio show, "a voice coming through a box once a week," which he said helped him "understand myself as part of a community, even though I was not connected with that community." During the 1970s the concept of community came to embody practical wisdom emerging from the bars, friendship networks, and a spate of new gay organizations: the knowledge that lesbians and gay men, joining together on the basis of a sexual identity, could create enduring social ties. In the process, sexuality was reconstituted as a ground of common experience rather than a quintessentially personal domain.

From its inception, activists pressed the community concept into the service of an identity politics that cast gays in the part of an ethnic minority and a subculture." Lesbians and gay men represent a constant io percent of the population, they contended, a veritable multitude prepared to claim its own distinct history, culture, and institutions. The basis for these arguments was, of course, laid earlier with the recognition that homosexuals could unite through bonds of friendship as well as sex, and elaborated through analogies with identity-based movements organized along racial lines." Many social scientists of the period subscribed to a similar paradigm in their studies of "the gay world." 13 Whether describing an aggregate of persons in ongoing interaction (Evelyn Hooker) or a "continuing collectivity" of individuals with common interests and activities (William Simon and John Gagnon), they tended to treat homosexuals as a fairly homogeneous group with concrete, if not readily ascertainable, boundaries. More recently Stephen Murray (1979) has used sociological criteria to argue for the validity of applying the community concept to gay men in urban areas of the U.

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