Introduction
The Journal of Homosexuality is devoted to scholarly research on homosexuality, including sexual practices and gender roles in their cultural, historical, interpersonal, and modern social contexts. In addition to research on human sexuality, articles in the journal also explore the political, social, and moral implications of research on human sexuality. A few of the following goals the Journal of Homosexuality has it to serve as a scholarly source of materials for research and educational programs dealing with homosexuality, particularly lesbian and gay studies programs and to confront homophobia through the encouragement of scholarly inquiry and the disseminations of research of sound research.
Critical Annotations …show more content…
By using queer theory, Pinar suggests that the democratization of American society cannot be reformed without reconstructing the notions of hegemonic white masculinity. As this male subjectivity and its narcissistic unity must be dissolved, as contends Katja Silverman and Leo Bersani, the repressed feminine composition and homosexual desire must be reclaimed. The text offers psychoanalytic and cross-cultural anthropological research to support these claims of compulsory heterosexuality and theorizing male heterosexual desire as a “complicated consequence of flight to the father following a horrified retreat from the mother” (358). This conceptualization shows us that hegemonic masculinity is a construction and heavily acted upon a traumatic privileging of difference. Pinar does little by way of apply these concepts to education and but mentions a type of “political pedagogical project” for queer theorists in education. This requires the ruination of hegemonic white male subjectivity, its “regression” to positionalities and subjectivities closer to sites of maternal …show more content…
Using a combination of film clips, photographs, and interviews to tell its story, the documentary is by turns touching, humorous, provocative, and upsetting. Its segments on McCarthyism and the social upheaval of the 1960s are particularly well done. As the film presupposes no knowledge of queer history on the part of the viewer, I feel it would provide students with an accessible overview of pre-Stonewall LGBTQ experience.
Published under pseudonym in 1951, The Homosexual in America is a sociological portrait of gay male life in mid-20th century America, in an unnamed city that reads very much like New York—and probably is New York, given that its author was eventually revealed as Edward Sagarin, a professor of sociology and criminology at City University. Written for a straight audience, with a surprising and charming sense of humor, the author explores (among other things) coded language and behaviors among gay men, the challenges to gay romance, as well as the world of underground “homosexual meeting