In order to understand homosexuality, you must understand full what it is. Homosexuals are attracted to their same sex. However, with that said this does not mean that the gay man wants to be a woman or the gay woman wants to be a man. Most are satisfied in their own body and they are just intimate with a person of their own sex. (Rathus, Nevid & Fichner-Rathus, 2005) Historical and scientific viewpoints are greatly significant in the way that gay persons distinguish themselves today and how the development of gay communities have grown and changed.
The Portrayal of Homosexuality in Raymond Chandler’s: The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler is the epitome of what it means to be a detective fiction writer, particularly in his novel The Big Sleep. Speir states that Marlowe is a microcosm of both Chandler’s concern for character and his concern for language by which that character is expressed (viii). Although Marlowe’s voice is the constant ground of Chandler’s stories, he uses other characters throughout the novel in a way that holds the reader’s attention. There are numerous aspects of this novel that could be the main focus. The main issue in this novel is the issue of homosexuality.
Frankenstein: A Gay Love Story Frankenstein is a gay love story disguised as a horror story. Percy Shelley wrote the first three chapters including the epistolary letters, and the tenor of the story and its characters can be directly compared to his life history. Though Percy never admitted to being gay, there is ample evidence that he was treated as different, and bullied mercilessly at school. Evidence also exists that many of his peers, and his circle of friends were gay. The women that touched their lives were used as beards to hide their homosexuality, which in early nineteenth century England was a ‘crime’ punishable by death, (Freeman).
In order to make it much more fun to both the reader and the writer, I will use Notes of a Desolate Man as textual evidence to analyze the influences of Capitalism on male homosexual in Taiwan, especially on upper-middle class homosexual like Xiao-Shao and his gay friends. The essay is composed of four sections: (1) middle-class queer identity; (2) the limit of capitalism; (3) vision of the future. Middle-class Queer Identity In this chapter, I will focus on how commodity capitalism constructs the identities of middle-class homosexual males. According to the Blackwell Reference On-line, “identities are social constructed – culturally and interactionally defined meanings and expectations – and are aspects of self-processes and structures that represent who or what a person or set of persons is believed to be.” Images of middle-class gay are clearly shown in Notes of a Desolate Man and can be seen as a kind of queer identities that result from the wide-spread application of capitalism. We can associate those male homosexual characters with a typical Yuppie Image.
Slams offer the poet to openly express the “personal” to the audience. Marc Smith, founder and grandmaster slammer advocates that “slam poetry at its best is when it is a personal life experience” (Smith). In relation to Asian-American (AA) males, the most common of poetic topics is the issue of self-identity, the double conscious and other generalizations of an Asian man. More specifically, the subject of AA male sexuality has been greatly expressed by these performance poets. “What it means to be an Asian-American male” and the emasculation of Asian men are a few perspectives that the spoken word poet would want to demonstrate to his audience.
“Camp and the Gay Sensibility” in AIi: Fear Eats the Soul Irony, humor, theatricality, and aestheticism are the four basic features of camp, which is an element of gay sensibility. Gay sensibility is seen as anything that is different from the most common. A perception of something that comes from ones’ gayness. Camp is “elements in a person, situation or activity which is express, or are created by, a gay sensibility.” (pg. 40) For gays, camp is a response to gay sensibility and the polarisation of what is ‘normal’ or and what is ‘abnormal.’ Not all gays respond the same to camp.
Most people would agree that Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale heart" is a story about how guilt can consume one’s life and that the truth provides a sense of satisfaction. However, how much are we diagnosing what Poe was trying to tell us? This story is about a gothic examination of a type of unexpected sexuality that Poe found too horrifying to tell the audience, keeping in mind that this type of incest (father-son) had not found itself in literature in the 1850's. Poe, which married his 13-year-old first cousin, dabbles with a lot of intimation of incestuous union between sibling in “The Fall of the House of Usher” but never father and son (it was considered extremely taboo.) For that reason, Poe tells a story in which the disturbing act of father-son incest is reenacted without being uncovered to his audience became his only outlet.
Oshima is a tall slender female who poses as a homosexual male; Kafka is a hyper muscular adolescent who is fully aware of his sexual identity. Much conflict that Oshima would face in his life would be external with society since today our culture is not completely contented with transgender individuals. Kafka, on the other hand, is an average boy who has no issues blending into a crowd. The magical realism in the novel is based around the internal conflict of Kafka escaping his own fate; the fact that Kafka befriends a person like Oshima only emphasizes this idea. An example of myths used in the novel is the Greek story of people searching for their other halves.
When exploring the historical perspectives, religions and traditions come into play. Centuries ago, homosexuality was common among Greeks and Romans. (Rathus et al., p.287) states that “in Greece, established men frequently formed sexual relationships with adolescent males at about the age at first growing a beard.” The Romans described highly feminine gay men who dressed flamboyantly, and showy hair styles and mannerisms, and cruised certain neighborhoods, searching for partners (Rathus et al., p.287). But in Christianity, Christians found this behavior sinful and unacceptable. Individuals who took part in this manner were punished.
The older males would insert and thrust their penises in between the adolescent male’s thighs until they ejaculated. Those considered “gay” in Roman times were feminine and drove through certain neighborhoods looking for a sexual partner. Homosexual acts were outlawed in Florence, and those caught committing sodomy were fined. Other times in history any types of sexual acts that did not produce a pregnancy were considered sinful. This meant that even sex between husband and wife was sinful if the wife did not conceive a child from the act.