Gay Defn & Meang - Merriam-Webster

Contents:

• STAGE GAY
• ABOUT THE CENTERSCE 1983 THE CENTER HAS BEEN SUPPORTG, FOSTERG AND CELEBRATG THE LGBT MUNY OF NEW YORK CY. FD MORE RMATN ON AND OUR WORK ABOUT THE CENTER. VIS ABOUT THE CENTEROUR MISSNCYBER CENTERCENTER HISTORYRACE EQUYMEDIA CENTERLEARSHIP & STAFFEMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNICORPORATE PARTNERSHIPSANNUAL REPORTS & FANCIAL INFORMATNCONTACT USHOURS & LOTNSEMAPSUPPORT THE CENTER
• THE HISTORY OF THE WORD “GAY”
• GAY
• 1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY THEATER
• WHAT DO IT MEAN TO BE GAY? DEFN AND MEANG OF GAY
• GAY (HOMOSEXUAL) AND GAY (HAPPY)
• THE 10 BT GAY MILS OF ALL TIME
• A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS

STAGE GAY

As our age note on the term stat, “up until 1973, homosexualy was listed The Diagnostic and Statistil Manual of Mental Disorrs (DSM), psychiatry’s standard reference on the classifitn of mental illns. And many feel that this word plac undue emphasis on sexual activy, or that sounds overly clil.” In fact, the term homosexual was liberately rejected by early gay rights activists bee, acrdg to The New York Tim, “they did not want to be intified as exclively sexual begs.”. Partially rponse to Stonewall, 1970, queer activists New York Cy anized a march to Central Park wh the theme “Gay Pri.” A more prehensive history of the Stonewall Rt or the Stonewall Uprisg n be found our Pri Month explaer.

ABOUT THE CENTERSCE 1983 THE CENTER HAS BEEN SUPPORTG, FOSTERG AND CELEBRATG THE LGBT MUNY OF NEW YORK CY. FD MORE RMATN ON AND OUR WORK ABOUT THE CENTER. VIS ABOUT THE CENTEROUR MISSNCYBER CENTERCENTER HISTORYRACE EQUYMEDIA CENTERLEARSHIP & STAFFEMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNICORPORATE PARTNERSHIPSANNUAL REPORTS & FANCIAL INFORMATNCONTACT USHOURS & LOTNSEMAPSUPPORT THE CENTER

Durg this stage, ’s particularly important for you to fe nstctive nnectns wh other gay and queer people, as this will foster your posive sense of self and more fort mtg to a particular label. He is passnate about helpg young LGBTQI people get the support they need, so he now donat his time at the lol youth service and march wh this ansiatn the annual Sydney Gay and Lbian Mardi Gras. Through an examatn of stage-gay, the notor practice of queer performativy on stage by straight performers the emo mic subculture, I vtigate how a rtrictive notn of “tth” discsns of queerbag n actually close off the very possibili of transformatn and open-end nfiguratns of sexualy that Alexanr Doty’s formulatn of queerns promised.

In the same volume, Emma Nord suggts there are two sis to queerbag—one versn has producers “htg at yet nyg queer ntent, and the other one has producers promisg gay characters yet not liverg proper reprentatn. When nsirg emo bands’ tentns performg stage-gay, we should look to explic statements ma by band members about s purpose: not to take them as transparent statements of fact, but as performative elements the Butlerian/Fouuldian sense, which be wh other visual and dible statements to nstct a disurse of queerns. We should also take to acunt the soc-cultural ntexts which stage-gay first me to public note: two boys kissg onstage at a hard rock ftival 2002 is an entirely different statement than the same gture ma a queer-iendly club 2020.

I will discs performers’ paratextual statements on the meangs of stage-gay while suatg agast the background of hardre and punk om which emerged, and go on to discs some of the ag that fans have ma om the texts. I will then be the lens of performativy wh the soclogil theori of Robert Heasley and Jane Ward, orr to terme that stage-gay n be really read as queerbag pends both on how we nsir the readg, the queer and the real.

THE HISTORY OF THE WORD “GAY”

Brennan and McDermott document a thread on the popular LGBT se Datalounge discsg wh a potedly homoerotic photoshoot starrg Jonas as an example of “panrg” or simply “showg his gay fans what they want to see. Readg 2006), to shouts of “faggots”: those of who were old enough to attend hardre and rock shows the early-mid 2000s will rell when there was nothg particularly remarkable about this vilent subcultural homophobia.

Emo bands the early 2000s were among the first performers to troduce this sort of performativy to an dience outsi basements, and certaly to brg to ftivals, which is why emo fandom ed stage-gay as a term. The send kd of stage-gay ncerns paratexts om televisn, magaz and social media: pos, gtur, signs, the wearg of T-shirts readg “I <3 [the other member of the pairg qutn]” and even explic sex jok.

”17 The thor has wrten before that gay jok are a hallmark of queerbag, and this is te, but typilly the humor operat the other way around: iends are mistaken for a uple, and humor is generated by their awkward rponse (see pecially the BBC’s Sherlock and the CW’s Supernatural).

GAY

Havg attend the ncerts of all three bands over a perd of nearly fifteen years, I thk is safe to say that recent years, the stage-gay has been toned down, possibly bee is rather ls strikg a statement mid-sized arenas 2020 than hardre and alternative rock clubs 2004. And ed, there were good-fah personal risks volved stage-gay: wearg a homema T-shirt readg “homophobia is gay” to a hardre club show the early 2000s, as MCR’s rhythm guarist Frank Iero once did, urted a real risk of retributn both sal and physil vlence. If we nceive stage-gay as a seri of time-bound, ntext-specific performative statements, seems to me neher that mandg the ner tth of a performer’s sexualy as the only te form of actualizatn is missg the pot.

This kd of ratifitn of fan practice om the subjects volved—as opposed to Way’s prev assertn that stage-gay was not tend to be ed “for” fanfic—do not make stage-gay any more or ls real, but grants a kd of license or thorizatn to queer fan practice, rultg a eer space of play. ” The feature si clarifi that while he isn’t actually gay, he fds the ephet people have ed as an sult agast him for most of his life to be ftg enough: “There is a sense of self-empowerment or repturg who you are by people llg you ‘fag’, and beg like, ‘Yeah, I am a fag. ”45 I suppose one sense, this uld be taken as an extreme act of queerbag by the edors of the magaze themselv, choosg that pull-quote as a tle page to prompt magaze sal: but aga, that requir rcg queerns to an intarian rigidy that, as Nord wr, may actually strengthen the heteronormative amework: as though all feme men mt be gay, all mascule girls mt be trans, and everyone needs to abi by the New Rul of Genr.

In the brilliantly tled, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight Whe Men, Ward warns agast an intarian nceptn of sexualy that assigns some sort of ratifitn label to dividuals on the basis of particular sexual acts. After all, if we n neatly ci what kds of queer activy unt as gay, and which don’t—somethg Ward’s stunts seem entirely nvced of their judgements — is much easier to mata the boundari of normal and abnormal and assign dividuals to those box. As Ward puts , To the extent that sexual ntact between straight whe men is ever acknowledged, the cultural narrativ that circulate around the practic typilly suggt that they are not gay their intarian nsequenc, but are stead about buildg heterosexual men, strengtheng hetero-mascule bonds, and strengtheng the bonds of whe manhood particular…In particular, I am gog to argue that when straight whe men approach homosexual sex the ‘right’ way—when they make a show of endurg , imposg , and repudiatg —dog so functns to bolster not only their heterosexualy, but also their masculy and whens.

1964: THE BIRTH OF GAY THEATER

Men have sex wh men acrdg to all sorts of “hetero-mascule scripts, ” such as adventure, male bondg, hazg, huiatn, and natnal secury that “functn to displace or mask homosexual attachments—even the ntext of homosexual sex. More promently than the queerns of terracial homoeroticism, we should nsir the fact that stage-gay the early 2000s effectively functned to dispt Ward's heteromascule scripts—the heteromascule script of the hardre ftival, a privileged se of heteronormative male bondg, was ostentatly queered by a bunch of “fags” wh electric guars takg pri of place on the stage.

”51 She not that while she might ocsnally e the terms gay and queer terchangeably, she has tried to rerve her of queer “for stanc which I am scribg what some might ll ‘the gay left, ’ or the movement to rist gay assiatn and celebrate sexual and genr non-normativy.

In an odd sense, says Ward, queerns has the stanc been “taken up by straights, ” as “gay inty is [creasgly] tethered to love and blogy…monogamo same-sex love and the gay and lbian fai prumed to ultimately rult om this love.

WHAT DO IT MEAN TO BE GAY? DEFN AND MEANG OF GAY

”54 In Ward’s schema, makp wearg straight boys, makg out at a hardre ftival over their phallic guars would certaly qualify as much queerer than two gay men gettg married the suburbs: “In sum, while the field of queer erotics has narrowed wh this turn to homonormative love, the field of hetero-erotics is ever expandg. ”61 This partly scrib the personas of, at the very least, Gerard Way, Pete Wentz, Ryan Ross and Brendon Urie, all of whom are equently perceived as gay: though given that they are all public performers who make liberate referenc to glam-rock, mp and new romanticism wh their wardrobe choic, there is probably more of a public tentn that overlaps to Category 2, the social jtice straight queer. …Yet when I read their says on genr and masculy for the soclogy urse I am teachg, I see that all three exprs tratn wh all the guys they know who act out, who are loud and so often dnk, who are homophobic and sexist.

At this stage, Heasley not, the boys aren’t actually dog anythg: they don’t speak up agast sexism or homophobia, and they don’t draw attentn to their non-normative stat: “They wear their baseball ps, play their vio gam, and do not take risks. Stage-gay emo is only queerbag if fans are nceived as satisfied by the narrowt fn of the queer possible, and moreover, if we read fans as simply acceptg passively what media texts have to offer.

GAY (HOMOSEXUAL) AND GAY (HAPPY)

At the Dis, Tommy Joe Ratliff and Adam Lambert durg the latter's Glam Natn tour, My Chemil Romance, Katy Perry's I Kissed a Girl, Way says he's pullg out the stage gay to challenge people's homophobia, but I thk he jt lik to make teenage girls aonvas Augt 1, 2010Flag. In the 1890s, the term “gey t” (a Sttish variant of gay) was ed to scribe a vagrant who offered sexual servic to women or a young traveler who was new to the road and the pany of an olr man. ” This le (ad-libbed by Grant) n be terpreted to mean that he was behavg a happy-go-lucky or lighthearted way but is accepted by many as the first e of gay to mean homosexual a mastream movie.

THE 10 BT GAY MILS OF ALL TIME

In May, the Temecula Valley Unified School District’s board voted 3 to 2 to reject a new curriculum that clud discsns on the gay rights movement and mentned Harvey Milk, the first out gay man elected to public office California.

That same year, Pieters beme a natnal spokperson for AIDS awarens and gay polil activism after his historic terview wh televangelist Tammy Faye on her broadst, which fied the work's homophobic tennci. In 1964, spe a social climate of homophobia that pervad Amerin life for the send third of the 20th century, two one-act plays prented Off-Off-Broadway at the Caffe Co revolutnized how gay characters uld be reprented theatrilly. Satirized the trial of Osr Wil sympathetilly), the Wilson and Patrick one-acts were unique that both featured gay characters set the prent time who were not only open, but boisteroly fiant.

We uldn’t jt log on to the ter or turn on the televisn to fd reprentatns of ourselv, we had to triangulate and hypothize om half-hts and sual pretory remarks by New York wrers about Greenwich Village parti and ffeeho that wh an only half-discerned arty Bohemian environment there might possibly be a ltle more acceptance of homosexuals.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS

In tanm wh the work of activist polil groups, which had begun anizg the late 1950s, the wrers at the Caffe Co—wh their wild talents for turng fantasy to theatril realy for their untercultural dienc—metaphorilly gave birth to the ncept of “gay liberatn.