Gay Communities, Gay World: The Evolution of Institutional Completeness and Organizational Sophistication

Abstract

Using the concepts of the institutional completeness of ethnic communities (Breton, 1964) and the gay male community (Lee, 1979) and more recently, 'deviant' organizational sophistication (Best and Luckenbill, 1982), this thesis examines the gay world argue that traditional concepts, in solitude or synthesis, cannot wholly illuminate the phenomenon of modern gay evolutionary development. Notions of subculture and community are inadequate tools by which to describe the complexity and cultural materials of a contemporary and emergent ethnographic unit of analysis: the gay world. Documentary and archival research, personal correspondence and in depth participant-observation have produced an array of historical and cultural materials and analyses of gay iconography, stereotypes, bars, and gay media. Structural features such as the politicization of homosexuality (the shift from rights lobbying to political and legal litigation) the politics of gender and AIDS, emergent age structures and the paradox of capitalist enterprise and liberation have also been examined. It is hypothesized that local gay communities (towns, cities, provinces, states and territories) do not themselves wholly depict this gay world. Rather, the communities and milieux are bound as the links of a chain, through often invisible networks of gay information, publishing, support services, recreation, leisure, unique artifacts and cultural materials. Many of these links exist world wide, traversing international customs, languages, traditions, legal systems, and concrete borders. These links show both variegation and similarity but most are based upon a unique fusion and specific unity, forged by a common prism of homosexual and gay oppression, identity, cu1ture, ideology, and more recently, a still emerging sense of gay identity.