Over the past thirty years, the homosexual movement has coalesced into a powerful force for cultural change. In fact, momentum for the normalization of homosexual behavior and relationships is now recognized in large segments of the society as a legitimate interest group. Though the identification of homosexuals as an organized political group was born in 1969 with the Stonewall riots in New York City, it really did not gain any kind of cultural momentum until the 1990s.
As evidence of this, look at the acceptance and promotion of homosexuality and homoeroticism in the mainstream media. Magazines, television programming, and Hollywood movies now feature positive representations of homosexuality and homosexual relationships. Without doubt, homosexual behavior did not begin in 1969. Nevertheless, until recent years, there has been no celebration of homosexuality and no attempt to bring it into the cultural mainstream. Even in the 1990s, it was only in the last years of that decade that the acceleration really arrived in force.
Columnist Maggie Gallagher has noted, "We have not always been so woefully dependent upon the sexual act itself. Two hundred years ago, for example, homosexuality did not exist. There was sodomy, of course, and buggery and fornication and adultery, and other sexual sins, but none of these forbidden acts fundamentally altered the sexual landscape. A man who committed sodomy may have lost his soul but he did not lose his gender. He did not become a homosexual--a third sex. That was the invention of the nineteenth century imagination."
This argument is debatable, but it is also very interesting--and it comes from both the right and the left. On the right are observers like Maggie Gallagher, who bases her argument on the natural law; while on the left one finds theorists like the late Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist philosopher. Both of these argued that, while there were men who committed homosexual acts and women who committed homosexual acts, there was no third species of "a homosexual" until Victorian times. Even in the twentieth century, homosexuality still was not well-accepted as an interest group until the late 1990s, when it became a part of popular culture. The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders only in 1973, and that was the result of political pressure rather than any kind of scientific or medical evidence. It took from 1973 to the late 1990s for this change to enter the popular consciousness.
Our engagement with the issue of homosexuality is no longer merely at the theological or theoretical level. It is being lived out in popular culture, where the homosexual agenda now has as one of its central aims to make homoerotic images, literature, language, and relationships as acceptable as heterosexual relationships. And this is not just a matter of Ellen Degeneres, Brokeback Mountain, and other developments on television and the movie screen.
During the 1990s, the work of photographer Bruce Weber, whose images have been a staple of homosexual pornography for many years, became a major turning point in the mainstreaming of homosexuality and homoeroticism. Weber's work came into great prominence in a series of advertisements he did for clothing designer Calvin Klein. Placed prominently in New York's Times Square, at bus stops and on billboards all over the city, these were the first advertisements to use the male physique in explicitly sexual images for the purpose of commercial gain. Rather than shocking the nation, the controversial pictures actually proved to be commercially productive.
Today, this kind of imagery is being targeted at younger and younger audiences. Eventually Abercrombie and Fitch, a major retailer to teenagers and young adults, hired Weber as its photographer, and his homoerotic images began decorating shopping malls across the country. In essence, the photographs were hardly short of pornographic. What has changed so fundamentally is this: Less than twenty years ago, most young men would have run from such images of barely clothed males in erotic poses. Now they have become so mainstream--and even so commercially successful--that homoerotic imagery has come to be recognized as one of the most effective advertising means of reaching young people.
