Homosexuals Raising Children in a Homophobic Society

Introduction

Perhaps because of the fluidity and possible variation in sexuality and gender expression, societies have endeavored to define norms that are maintained through rule creation and enforcement, individual and group vigilance, and language aimed at reinforcing notions of sexual and gender conformity. In the past, religious institutions, local communities, and extended families upheld the greatest portion of responsibility for maintaining sexuality and gender norms. As educational institutions, particularly tax-supported schools, proliferated, however, they bore ever-increasing responsibility for imparting normative sexuality and gender in youth. This shift in responsibility was most pronounced during full-scale industrialization of the economy, which had as an attendant consequence the greater involvement of parents in wage-earning work outside the home. Schools then assumed growing responsibilities for raising children to the degree that working parents declined it. Schools essentially became important agencies in defining and shaping sexuality and gender among youth.

Discussion

Sociological work has often been in close dialogue with parallel and overlapping work by historians and anthropologists who share interests in documenting the lives of nonheterosexual people, tracing the evolution of identity and community or comparing the social construction of sexual patterns in different societies around the world. Perhaps the earliest known example of sociological ethnography is Maurice Leznoff and Terry “The Homosexual Community” which began as an M.A. thesis and appeared as an article in 1956 in Social Problems. It treated the largely subterranean social networks of gay men in Montreal at a time when homosexuality was subject to criminal penalty. Sociological treatments of gay and lesbian topics did not emerge in any sustained way until the mid-1970s, following the momentous social changes of the 1960s, marked symbolically in the history of the gay and lesbian movement by the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 (Nardi, 174). In 1976, a group of faculty and graduate students gathered in a hotel room at a meeting of the American Sociological Association to found the Sociologists Gay Caucus (later Sociologists Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus) (Adam, 11). It is also in 1976 that a division in sexual behavior (later sexual behavior, politics, and community) formed in the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In this period, new work appeared that laid out leading themes pursued by sociologists in subsequent years: surveys of sexual behavior, phenomenological and interactionist accounts of living gay in a homophobic world, reflections on the dynamic growth and historical evolution of gay and lesbian communities, ethnographies of those communities, and examination of social movements and their impacts on the societies around them. Since the 1980s, these concerns were supplemented by studies of the emerging AIDS epidemic, relationships and family building, and the diversity of homosexual and bisexual experiences in terms of ethnocultural communities in Western societies, (trans)gender variations, and societies in the global South.

The rising preoccupation of the 1990s and 2000s with the legal recognition of same-sex relationships (Duggan, 89) has increasingly placed the formation of intimate relationships on the forefront of the public agenda and influenced the direction of research ...