Sexuality and American Culture

Foucault’s deployment of sexuality marks a shift from a system based on marriage and kinship to a broader, more mobile network of relationships.  Using Weston’s essay as an outline and Kushner’s play as a demonstration, I would like to parallel this Foucauldian shift with the following progression of relevant relationships within the discourse of sexuality: from family to community and from community to friends.

In the transition from alliance to sexuality, Foucault places the family unit at the center.  It is the point of interchange, the conveyor of the law as well as of the economy of pleasure.  As Weston claims, for years it seemed that there was “one universally agreed-upon definition of family” which excluded lesbian and gay identity from that “unitary object.”  According to the following two assumptions, a gay individual represented a rejection of the family: homosexuals do not have children or form long term relationships, and they alienate actual kin when they come out.

As the term “community” emerged, “sexuality was reconstituted as a ground of common experience rather than a quintessentially personal domain,” and it was put into the service of an identity politics that cast gays in the part of an ethnic minority or subculture” (502).  Now, as members if a “unified totality,” all lesbians and gays could use “kinship terminology.”  While this shared “identity” and “likeness” allowed this “community” to seem like a “family,” it also left lesbians and gays with no choice; they were all automatically kin (503).  Also, as Marcella observes, this inclusion leads to the alienation embodied by the character of Roy Cohn.  For him, the community represented a group of certain qualities, and he only shared one: his sexual practices. 

“By the late 1970s,” according to Weston, “signs of disenchantment with the unity implicit in the concept of community began to appear” and the concept of “gay community” faced rejection (503), leading to a new sort of family-centered discourse, this time however, not one based on given relationships, but based on chosen ones.  That so many homosexuals faced denouncement at coming out to blood relatives, in itself undermined “the permanence culturally attributed to blood ties while highlighting categories of choice and love” (505).  The “chosen families” created by gays and lesbians grouped together friends and lovers and children.  As this a more inclusive approach, perhaps this novel friend-family hybrid is more of a true unity, and better positioned at the heart of the discourse of sexuality.

It is not until the 1980s, that “for the first time, gay men and lesbians systematically laid claim to families of their own…” (Peiss ed., 498).  The new discourse grouped friends and lovers into new categories of “family.”  Indicative of this shift from kinship ties is Kushner’s Prior, whose many prior incarnations appear in the play.  Though he does communicate with the ghosts of his blood ties, he also has many strong connections to people not genetically related to him, namely two of his lovers: Belize and Louis.

While the adage tells us that blood is thicker than water, chosen relationships are just as strong, if not more.  A recent article in the New York Times cites the importance of friendship (relationships I would define as chosen, not given) to our health.  Specifically, that “Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”  Friends and families are terms and concepts that are not mutually exclusive.