When making comparisons and analogies, people more often than not focus on the difference of visibility that is the gay experience as analogically dissonant from that of its most frequent comparators— women and blacks.
There is fine reasons to do make those comparisons and analogies , for having difference marked on someones body creates both specific discourses of the abject and different efforts to constrain and control.
So, the place of visibility and recognition figure significantly here.
For example, while “coming out” might have changed in this new era of media visibility, internet,and tepid social embrace, coming out remains a process that is pretty much uniquely “gay” in its very essence.
Entry into the public eye itself becomes the sign of gay inclusion exactly because gays can assimilate so good, and can hide with such ease. These declamatory moments have distinct resonance for gays: “I do” and “Don’t Ask,
It justifies gay inclusion and speaks to the contiguous argument that open service will like the integration of blacks and (partial) integration of women—in general have positive effects on military readiness.
Assuredly these analogies have been handy and they hold some merit.
They have been embraced many, including African Americans, who see the “basic equality” questions that open service raises as not too different to those that are faced by other oppressed minorities and women.
While segregation and exclusion are not precisely the same as closeted presence and formal rejection, they are close cousins, both in their structural incentives (to instantiate second-class status, to legally discriminate) and their experiential effects (resentment, being afraid, isolated and losing employment).
The debate points that are used in both instances keep striking similarities with opponents who invoke gay stereotypes in a manner similar to black stereotypes and female stereotypes that are used in previous eras.
Similar antagonistic attitudes were conveyed around army desegregation, including arguments about isolation, unit cohesion, morale, etc.
Most definitely, some of the resistance to black integration into the armed services were derived from a prejudicial belief in the appropriateness of those whites who didn’t want to have to associate in such “close quarters” with blacks.
Similar complaints to open gay service members play this “close quarters” card too, creating a heady combination of contagion worries, infiltration anxiety, and the tainting of the purity of (male, hetero- sexual, white) military way of life. Obviously, in the sexual-orientation
We could do better to make nuanced, historically specified comparisons instead of using overarching analogies. In making the analogical case, it is difficult to avoid the argument that gays are “like” blacks because, similar to skin color, gayness is something that one does not choose; it’s something that one is born with through “no fault of their own.”
Now, the simple analogy conveniently conceals race itself as a social construction, a fiction. Moreover, the analogy can’t avoid reasserting the troubling assumption of gayness as whiteness and blackness as heterosexual. This bolsters the old opposition (all the women are white, all the blacks are men) that refuses to view not only the constructedness of these categories but certainly also their overlapping or intersecting nature (i.e some of those gay soldiers are black, Latino, etc.).
This is where we can not help but fear analogical move that functionally leads to black lesbian and gay service members disappearing. The simple and glib usage of the analogy can make racial and gender discrimination seem like a thing of the past—a victory of brave integrationism and tolerance over (now formally delegitimized) archaic prejudice.
In the case for women and blacks, the debate centers more on the definitions of race and gender in terms of access, identity, behaviors, etc. Gays are inevitably swept up in a public discourse that takes both cause and effect head on and then eventually links the two—particularly in a second of biological obsessiveness.
As one analyst succinctly said “[p]rior to the 1940s, dismissal was based on conduct, that is, the commission of an act of sodomy; in the postwar era, the attention shifted to status or identity, that is, to sexual orientation.”
The current hegemonic debate against inclusion (excluding for a second ones that express an easy and unadorned hatred of homosexuals) is predicated on the issue of unit cohesion.
This is where the analogies of race and gender are sensible, but to a point. The argument is that many ser- vice members do not in fact feel comfortable with, if not antagonistic toward, gays and thus will not be able to function to their optimal ability if openly gay people serve in the military beside them.
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