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The Influence of Pop Music
The history of homosexuality and its negative impact on society
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More handpicked essays just for you.
The Influence of Pop Music
The history of homosexuality and its negative impact on society
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
When a child is born they go through the process of figuring out who they really are, as well as who they want to be. Society in many ways negatively impacts the freedom a child has whilst exploring this phase in life. It dictates what to do, and what not to do. Strong parental figures help shield young kids away from society at large and allow them to make their own decisions without any fear. Through reading the pieces “My son is Gay” and “I like to wear dresses” and Ivan Coyote we see how hatred directed towards children for just being themselves often discourages children from exploring their gender.
Even though Fred grew up wanting to be just like his dad, when he reached a certain time in his life, he knew he was not happy with his identity. Fred did not identify as most other people did and called himself two-spirited (Nibely, 2009). In more recent times, more people have begun to identify against what is considered to be traditional. According to the documentary, Cathy Renna, a LGBTQ activist in New York says that queer youth tend to be more fluid in their actions (Nibely, 2009). This was true for Fred too, who did not like labeling himself.
Society tries to create a “perfect” image on people; leading us to believe that if we are not the specific way that we created, we do not fit in. In reality everybody is supposed to create themself, regardless of what society believes. Does what we label others matter? Who are we to judge how others chose to create themselves? In David Crabb’s memoir Bad Kid, Crabb takes the readers through what it was like discovering that he is gay, and how that changed how kids treated him during school.
At the time he was a closeted gay kid but had other feeling about men. Around 14 he admitted his likings toward boys, not girls. He had been having “compulsions” about men. All he could think about is not being with them but being with their dead
One of the most important lessons a person must learn is how to balance everything in their life. From relationships to jobs and all that’s in between. In the play Guys and Dolls, originally directed by Robert Alda, the lead character Nathan Detroit has trouble balancing the ways of his crap game and his fiancé, Adelaide Lament, wants to get married. The conflict that Nathan goes through is caused by Adelaide wanting to get married, it causes Nathan to lie about the crap game and it creates many other problems for other characters.
Even to this day, shame about one’s sexual orientation remains a prominent topic. Whether one identified themselves as gay, lesbian, and transgender, society viewed them and their actions as a sin, a crime, and a disease, which only increased the amount of shame–a painful feeling of distress or humiliation caused by the consciousness of wrong or fooling behavior–they saw within themselves. Then changes began to occur as a group of gays, lesbians, and transgender people confronted police in an event known as the Stonewall Riots or the Stonewall Uprising, which became a turning point for gay liberation. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a 1980s, family tragicomic-graphic memoir that addresses this perspective turning point through the use of the labyrinth
“The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: "An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail" : Stephan Cohen : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, 14 August 2019, https://archive.org/details/cohen-gylib. Accessed 23 March 2023. K, Kristi. “Something Like A Super Lesbian: Stormé DeLarverie (In Memoriam).”
As someone who feels as though they are well versed in issues of LGBT discrimination and history, I felt so taken aback by this history of violence and systemic homophobia, and that I wasn’t even fully aware of it’s extent. Feinberg’s writing provided me with a lot of insight relating to current issues and the history of the LGBT movement. The most important thing I think to take away from this novel is to think outside of the binary in terms of gender expression or sexual orientation. Humans are not black and white and neither are their psychological makeups, trying to fit all of humanity into two neat, strict boxes does not work for a vast majority of the population. Realizing that even within the gay and lesbian community pressure to identify as “the man” or “the woman” in a relationship is very real.
What Defines History? History is what makes what we are today, without history the world would be a different place to everyone everywhere. If there was no history, we would have to make up stories of what happened in the past. I agree with the quote “history is written by the winners” (Alex Haley) because history plays a big role with all the past explorers and what they have done.
For example, many songs that are hailed as gay anthems in disco, one being ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor, are not explicitly about queer experiences, but the overall messages they relay and sometimes the singers behind the message hold the power. There is an idea of gay ‘knowingness’, expressed in The Dialetic of Disco, that reinforces this idea of the songs being important to queer culture but not necessarily directly about queer experience. Songs like ‘YMCA’ are much more popular with those who are not queer, but they fail to see the homosexual implications of its content. Contrast this to songs which are openly concentrated on the subject of being queer, especially in punk, such as ‘I’m Illegal’ by Team
The queer historical past has been characterized positively, with aspects such as identification, desire, longing, and love highlighted (31). In contrast, Heather Love seeks to focus on the negative aspects that characterize the relationship of queer history amid the past and present, in her work, “Emotional Rescue: The demands of Queer History,” the first chapter in her book, “Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History” (31-32). According to Love, some queer critics have failed to include the harsher accounts when studying queer cross-historical relations. The negative aspects of the past that queer figures can relate to makes it relevant. In her article, Love critiques various works to identify the negative aspects present within the queer history.
The focus on Mozart in the film as opposed to Salieri in the play The character of Mozart undergoes the most significant change from stage to screen. On stage he is portrayed as a genius composer but he is also is crude, vulgar, and a tactless young egotist who has absolutely no modesty with regard to his talent. Not only is he the centre of drama but he is shown as innocent and naïve to the devious world of court politics and too insensitive to veil his contempt for the court and Salieri’s music. It is partly due to the influence of Milos Forman that Mozart’s character was changed so drastically in the film.
Gus Van Sant, the director of the movie, chose to include every detail that he possibly could to relate this movie to American Democracy. He strategically included heterosexual and homosexual actors to spark a political debate. The director clearly wanted to make a point about the discrmination against the LGBTQ society. He emphasizes this by having homosexuals march down the streets of San Francisco, destroying city property.
Tracing a parallel with Marx, Bourdieu (1984/2010: 102) affirms that the volume and composition of capital gives form and value to the determination of the other properties on practice. Families, thus, diverge in their adopted practices to maintain or increase their set of assets and position on the class structure. On this sense and complementing the Marxist contribution, the social trajectory of an individual’s capital accumulation also represents an important stratification factor, as a person might not follow his class-expected path according to his/her relation to the social world. Nonetheless, Bourdieu agrees on Marx’s position on how rigid stratification is, although taking a broader interpretation by assuming that “major moves between
Though he could not be explicit in his representation of homosexuality or queerness, in the