There remains an under-representation and perhaps misrepresentation of gay and lesbian characters in television, although this is changing. Great Britain has proven itself to be progressive in this area; a frank television miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
was produced in 1981 (and was a cult hit in the US); more recent gay successes include
Queer as Folk, Absolutely Fabulous,
and openly gay chat show host Graham Norton. In the US, the most well-known and perhaps most controversial example, discussed earlier, was
Ellen
. While none of the main characters on the hit sitcom
Friends
was gay, the ex-wife of one of them was a lesbian, which was always treated matter-of-factly.
Will & Grace
was the first comedy series to feature a gay man as a lead character; throughout its run, it was a major hit with gay and straight audiences alike. Perhaps as an indication of how far things have swung: in 2008, audience members, most of them straight women, protested that two gay male characters on the CBS soap opera
As the World Turns
weren’t being portrayed as frankly as a heterosexual couple would.
—Pierre Albertini
Alwood, Edward.
Straight News: Gays, Lesbians and the News Media.
New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996.
Chauncey George.
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940
. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Gross, Larry. “Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media,” In
Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power
. Edited by Hans Borchers et al. London: Routledge, 1990.
Howes, Keith.
Broadcasting It: An Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality on Film, Radio, and TV in the UK, 1923– 1993
. London: Cassel, 1999.
Russo,Vito.
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies
. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
Sanderson, Terry.
Mediawatch: The Treatment of Male and Female Homosexuality in the British Media
. London: Cassell. 1995.
Signorile, Michelangelo.
Queer in America: Sex, the Media and the Closets of Power
. New York: Random House, 1993.
Steakley, James D. “Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenburg Affair in Wilhelmin Germany,” In
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past
. Edited by George Chauncey et al. New York: New American Library, 1989.
Tamagne, Florence.
Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe, Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–
1939. Paris: Le Seuil, 2000. [Published in the US as
A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939
. New York: Algora, 2004.]
Weeks, Jeffrey.
Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Ninetenth Century to the Present Time
. London: Quartet Books, 1977.
—Art; Caricature; Censorship; Cinema; Literature; Outing; Publicity; Scandal.
MEDICINE
In order to ponder the homophobia of medicine, or medical practices which contribute to the rejection of homosexuality by society, one has to take into consideration its ambivalent process, in which scientific statements are sometimes exclusionary and sometimes, on the contrary, favor inclusion. As a sign of this ambivalence, some of the most important players of the first gay movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, like German sexologist Magnus
Hirschfeld
, produced a medical discourse whose theoretical framework was no different from that of doctors who were trying to “eradicate” homosexuality either by
treatment
of individuals or through eugenic measures.
Thus, to understand the history of the relations between medicine and homophobia, it is necessary to follow several clues which lead to paradoxical conclusions. One must first understand the social and scientific conditions existing at a given moment in history, such that homosexual practices and/or the homosexual individual become legitimate scientific objects for study by medicine. When this is the case, this phenomenon evolves within a particular context of the history of medicine, which, after undergoing a number of mutations, became a privileged ancillary of the state (with demography being born at the same time) in the “management of populations.” As the science of the human body, medicine is called upon to address the usage of the sex organs, thereby bringing to the fore the same notion of “sexuality” as that stressed by Michel Foucault. From then on, its discourse is structured around two objectives: one that favors reproduction and the other which ameliorates the quality of its “result,” Malthusian theses offering a radical variation where it is a question of considering only “good reproduction.” This context then allows for the comprehension of the axes of questioning which provide many opportunities for the expression of homophobia: homosexuality is a diversion from the finality of the sexual act, and in the same way as onanism or masturbation, it compromises the possibilities for future reproduction or, at least, it may alter the quality of the result of any reproduction.
This matrix of the medical discourse allows us to proceed to the level of scientific statements, which can be found in
psychiatry
by the end of the nineteenth century. “Contrary” to the genetic instinct of the human species, homosexuality is then perceived as troublesome, the responsibility for which is not incumbent on individuals who find themselves so afflicted. Just like
suicide
, homosexuality cannot result from choice, in the sense that even the most criminal mind cannot “choose” to oppose his vital impulses. It followed, then, that the result of “naturalizing” homosexuality was to pathologize it. It is in this naturalizing/pathologizing context that a paradoxical alliance between the nascent gay militancy and medicine was constructed. And, in the context of imperial Germany, which imprisoned men who engaged in sexual relations with one another, medicine advanced arguments which depicted the homosexual as a victim of a pathology who was more in need of compassion than punishment.
A century later, the same paradox appeared in the context of
genetics
. Research into the genetic causes of homosexuality was the direct result of this science during the nineteenth century, which found the origin of sexual
perversion
in the hypothesis of morbid heredity, linked by the theory of
degeneracy
. Following eugenics-oriented research in the 1940s, the genetics approach to homosexuality obtained its seal of approval at the end of the twentieth century, thanks in part to the support of American gay and lesbian activists who, when confronted by advocates of the religious right, interpreted these findings as proof that homosexuality was also the “work of God,” or at least of nature. Further, for many gays and lesbians, their perception of their own homosexuality was that it was not a question of choice, and even less a social construction. Genetics thus provided a biological rationale that satisfied not only gays and lesbians but also homophobes who envisioned its eugenic applications which would allow, for example, a prenatal genetic diagnosis of sexual orientation.
At this time, these findings compel one to ask the question of the role of medicine regarding homosexuality from a more general perspective. The process through which common-sense facts (e.g., “Certain people have sexual practices with people of the same sex”) mutates into a “scientifically true” medical category (i.e. “homosexuality”) tends to construe the fact of “being different” as a form of absolute
otherness
. This situation is similar to the scientific construction of the notion of race; in this sense, homophobia is directly related to racism in an analysis of the political and social uses of science.
In this framework, it is not possible to consider a non-homophobic medicine, other than through a means that renounces the consideration of homosexuality as an object in order to better construct the homosexual as a subject. This would also imply the renouncing of a number of certain scientific facts and, more particularly, research into the biological causes of homosexuality. This concept was at the heart of a movement that first started in the United States in the 1960s when American homophile
associations
promoted the idea of homosexual “well being,” which encouraged the flowering of an individual vis-à-vis sexual orientation in light of the risks of depression, alcoholism, and
suicide
due to his homophobic environment. Further to this, and in the same perspective, gay community health centers and gay physicians’ groups such as the Association des médecins gais (Association of Gay Doctors) in France were established. Finally, it is in this context that the gay community’s response to the
AIDS
epidemic in the 80s was constructed, at the level of prevention as well as taking care of the sick.
—Pierre-Olivier de Busscher
Aron, Jean-Paul, and Roger Kempf.
La Bourgeoisie, le sexe et l’honneur
. Brussels: Complexe, 1984.
Bullough,Vern.
Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research
. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
Dynes, Wayne R., and Stephen Donaldson.
Homosexuality and Medicine, Health and Science
. New York: Garland, 1992.
Foucault, Michel.
Histoire de la sexualité
.Vol. I : “La volonté de savoir.” Paris: Gallimard, 1976. [Published in the US as
The History of Sexuality
. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.]
Lantéri-Laura, Georges.
Lecture des perversions: histoire de leur appropriation médicale
. Paris: Masson, 1979.
Rosario,Vernon, ed.
Science and Homosexualities
. New York/ London: Routledge, 1997.
—Biology; Degeneracy; Endocrinology; Ex-Gay; Fascism; Genetics; Himmler, Heinrich; Hirschfeld, Magnus; Inversion; Medicine, Legal; Perversions; Psychiatry; Psychoanalysis; Treatment.
MEDICINE, LEGAL
Legal medicine, which deals with the application of medical knowledge to legal problems and proceedings, was arguably the first medical discipline to consider itself an “expert” on the issue of homosexuality, especially during the period of transition between the religious control of sexual practices and the medicalization of homosexuality by the
psychiatric
community in the second half of the nineteenth century. The treatment of the homosexual question by religious forces was manifested in the outright condemnation of homosexuality by the church, and by the states that were, at least in European monarchies, the secular arm of divine law. The goal of legal medicine was to prove the existence of homosexual practices; in this sense, and contrary to subsequent research, this field of medicine did not propose any analysis of the causes of homosexuality, nor any
treatment
for it, and even less, it did not construct the “homosexual” (or pederast, as the word homosexuality had not yet been invented) as a specific entity. Its only goal, as an expert science of the body, was to unearth evidence of sexual activity between two individuals of the same sex. In societies that did not legally repress homosexuality, such as post-revolution France, the work of legal medicine was allowed to continue, including complementary research into criminal situations such as prostitution, blackmail, and violent crimes.
Three studies marked this disciplinary field in an important way: Paolo Zacchias, in Italy, at the beginning of the seventeenth century; J. L. Casper, in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century; and the Frenchman Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, a professor of legal medicine at the Université de Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Their findings share a similar structure, combining a “sociological” dimension that described the social habits of those “guilty” of homosexual practices (a discourse which usually included a “sociology” of the gutter, as nineteenth-century theorists were pleased to describe it) and a physiological dimension based on the idea that the body’s organs which were used for activities that were not “natural” were irreparably damaged. This latter concept had similarities to physiological studies of rape, whose objective was to find tangible signs of constraint during sexual intercourse. Tardieu’s study of pederasts was, incidentally, part of a more general document dealing with indecent assault and rape.
In addition to its position as an auxiliary science supporting the religious and/or legal repression of homosexuality, the discourse around legal medicine largely contributed to the legitimization of certain negative representations of homosexuality in
medicine
and, more significantly, in society. Due to the criminal activity that homosexuals must naturally deal with, legal medicine postulated that homosexuality could only be understood in the sordid context of nightlife, between ports of call and brothels, where prostitution, blackmail, racketeering,
treason
, and exploitation were common occurrences. This link—which caused Tardieu to remark that pederasty (read homosexuality) was the school where the most audacious criminals were trained—was renewed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Cesar Lombroso, the Italian criminologist who theorized that criminality was inherited; he further suggested there were connections between “born criminals” and “born inverts,” which allowed for the construction of all discourses on the social danger of homosexuality (which Jean Genet would later use to his advantage in his revolt against society).
What’s more, according to legal medicine, the highest proof of homosexuality is the dilation of the anus (in spite of Tardieu’s claims of another: penises that have been twisted and thinned out by repeated penetration of an orifice that is too narrow “by nature”). According to this view, passive anal penetration is represented physiologically by an anus with a relaxed sphincter that is formed like a funnel, and buttocks that take on feminine characteristics; such penetration is then associated with homosexuality. In this, the French insult “
enculé
” (referring to a man who is “fucked in the ass”) finds its scientific basis; moreover, these feminine characterizations of the invert’s nether regions, often accompanied as well by a slight development of the chest and an atrophy of the penis, prefigure theories on
inversion
, which will represent homosexuality only in terms of gender inversion. In this sense, legal medicine invented the homosexual body, anchoring differences of behavior in flesh, following a process similar to that of colonial medicine and physical
anthropology
which, during the same era, invented the idea of race.
—Pierre-Olivier de Busscher