Making Space for Gay and Lesbian Children Changing Meanings of Child Protection and Sexuality in the United States Today

MAKING SPACE FOR GAY AND LESBIAN CHILDREN: CHANGING MEANINGS OF CHILD PROTECTION AND SEXUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES TODAY A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Anthropology. 2013 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………….…… 1 Chapter 1: Sexuality Out of Place………………..……………………………….….…. 15 Chapter 2: Containing Deviance…………………………………………….………….. 36 Chapter 3: Redefining Protection…………...………………………….……………….. 51 Chapter 4: Imagining the Future………………………………………………………... 66 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..…….. 78 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………. 83 List of Figures Figure 1: Gallup Poll on the Origins of Homosexuality…………………………………. 2 iii Introduction For the first time in the United States more Americans believe that homosexual relationships are morally acceptable rather than morally wrong. The majority is slight (only a few percent), but the implications of this cultural upheaval are enormous (Saad 2012). Nine states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriage; Maine, Maryland, and Washington joined in 2013, the first states to legislate gay marriage by popular vote (Cole 2013, Carter and Brennan 2012). On May 9, 2012, President Barack Obama became the first sitting president to publicly support same-sex marriage (Stein 2012). Federal government workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is prohibited. Twenty states and the District of Colombia also protect against such discrimination in both public and private sectors with several more states, counties, and cities extending protections to some workplaces (Nolo 2013). Seventy-eight sitting state legislature members (1.06%) identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual in 2009 (Haider-Markel 2010:118). And seven in ten voters say they would support a gay or lesbian candidate if he or she shared their views on political issues (Haider-Markel 2010:51). The gay rights movement, writes Georgetown University Law Center professor David Cole, “has achieved, more swiftly than any other individual rights movement in history, not merely the impossible, but the unthinkable” (2013). For centuries, same-sex couples in the United States have experienced stigma and ostracism. Unable to publicly express their sexual preferences and relationships without condemnation, people like 64-year-old Bill Smith from North Carolina and 27-year-old iO Tillett Wright from New York felt they were, and to extent remain, “second-class citizens” (Kinsman 2012, Wright 2012). Since the mid-1970s, activists have come forward to campaign for change: the right to equal treatment in the workplace, the right to marry, the right to serve openly in the United States military, and the balance has finally tipped. Homosexuality, once unmentionable and shameful, has more and more pockets of tolerance, even open acceptance, in the United States. However, one trend line fails to conform to these changes rippling across the country. While Americans are increasingly accepting homosexual adults into legislatures and marriage registration offices, they remain deeply divided on why homosexuality exists in the first place. Are people born homosexual? Or are they made homosexual – perhaps through flawed parenting or a lack of protection against other homosexuals? From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the view that homosexuality is an internal orientation from birth grew steadily, mirroring growing acceptance of homosexual relationships in the United States. Figure 1: Gallup Poll on the Origins of Homosexuality Fifteen years ago, progress plateaued and has remained immune from the recent string of successes in the gay rights movement (Saad 2012, see Figure 1). Americans continue to struggle to explain homosexuality. The fifteen-year stalemate is far from an insignificant artifact of history. It is the battleground that remains for the gay rights movement. Victories like same-sex marriage and legal action against workplace discrimination – in other words, the acceptance of gay and lesbian   2 adults into the public and private cultural institutions of the United States – are beginning to appear inevitable given current trends. But the loudest dissenting voices and emotionfilled conflicts focus on children, not adults. These conflicts include the heated debates, nearly constant since July 2012, over whether the Boy Scouts of America should permit openly homosexual people into membership and leadership positions in their organization, the tolerability of gay and lesbian bullying in schools or youth groups, and extremely divided views about the impact of gay parents on youth. These child-centered negotiations of homosexuality are caused by unresolved origin questions. Is homosexuality contagious? Is homosexuality changeable? Can it be prevented or discouraged? As I shall explore in the following chapters, children have become the focal point of current debates about homosexuality. In contrast with skin color and sex, the basis of other pivotal civil rights struggles, sexual preference is a trait indeterminable at birth. The fifteen-year stalemate over the origin of homosexuality alludes to two diametrically opposing views about gay and lesbian children. If sexuality is a fundamental identity or ‘orientation’ that persists throughout a lifetime, then loving our children can mean accepting them for who they are – homosexual and heterosexual alike. Yet half of Americans view sexuality differently. If sexuality is learned, influenced by a child’s environment or parenting, then loving our children can mean protecting them from forces and people who could push them from the ‘normal’ path of heterosexual development. This fundamental opposition underlies contemporary gay rights conflicts. While the United States is increasingly conceding acceptance to gays and lesbians once they are adults, we remain divided on how to understand homosexuality in children.   3 The Plan Why is homosexuality in and around children so contentious in the United States? What historical ideas continue to inform present day conflict? How does conflict over homosexuality and children relate to and embody other social anxieties? To answer these questions, I plan to move beyond explanations of morality to ask how and why certain ideas and associations are salient in this historical moment. By studying the vastly different convictions Americans hold about the origin of homosexuality and its influence on children, it is possible to make sense of social conflicts occurring today in the United States, such as the recent controversy over the Boy Scouts of America’s exclusion of homosexual members and leaders. Focusing on children takes me in a different direction than many other scholars of gay rights conflicts. More common lenses include the intersection of homosexuality and religious faith, homosexuality and gender performance, legal interpretations of free speech and privacy rights, and the politics of including homosexual people in the military or in the institution of marriage (Rodriguez 2010, Hillman 2011, Richards 2005, Rimmerman 1996, Chamie and Mirkin 2011). I believe my focus on children lends a fresh perspective by putting the contemporary conflicts over homosexuality in schools, youth groups, and families first. Focusing on children reveals how homosexuality and in turn homophobia have been constructed as major societal threats. Each chapter of my thesis will set up a layer of American culture, the historical origins of each layer moving roughly from the past to the present. These historical layers are important because they form the paradigms or ‘eyeglasses’ that continue to be influential in modern ways of living and thinking, how people see and interact with the   4 world and form the basis for actions and arguments. These layers build on each other to create a framework in which present day conflicts over homosexuality and childhood can be understood as friction between cultural ideas. I will begin in the late 18th century when the Industrial Revolution prompted the physical and conceptual separation of children from adults in the United States. Children across socioeconomic levels left the labor force and went to school, transitioning from having a peer-like status with adults to being vulnerable and not-yet grown, specially demarcated for intellectual and moral learning. Sexuality was something that children became not ‘ready’ for, like getting married, owning a business, or other ‘adult’ activities. Intrusion of sexuality in children’s lives became harmful and taboo. This special categorization of children as not-adults is influential in the two dominant views of homosexuality today. While there is a long history of intolerance towards homosexuality in the United States, a concept emerged during the cold war era that gave homosexuality an incredible amount of power; it was understood as a sickness, a contagious moral corrosion that could put the entire nation in danger by decreasing an individual’s ability to resist communist infiltration. Anxiety about national borders was partially expressed through concern about keeping children away from gay and lesbian adults who might try to harm them or convert them from their innocent preheterosexuality to homosexuality. While many Americans still believe that children should be protected from homosexuality, the gay rights movement beginning in the 1970s introduced a new conception of homosexuality as an ‘orientation,’ the second discourse of homosexuality I will explore. Inspired by black and women’s civil rights movements, a homosexual   5 orientation is described as neither better nor worse than a heterosexual orientation; it is merely a minority identity. Interestingly, in this shift, the language of child protection remains but in a modified form. Supporters of the orientation model assert that children who identify as homosexual or are perceived to be homosexual should be protected from harassment and discrimination. In other words, homosexuals (including children) should be protected from the people who argue that homosexuality harms children and society. I will conclude by examining the idea of children as symbols of the future. The origins of this idea are unclear, perhaps it occurred close to the Industrial Revolution when children became conceptually separate from adults, but it reigns dominant in discussions and debates about social and cultural change. Comparing visions of the future illuminates how those who conceptualize homosexuality as harmful understand the world around them much differently than gay rights supporters. These visions heavily influence arguments about child welfare, creating paradigms that guide arguments and actions today. Theoretical Groundings Throughout this analysis, I will use two main theoretical and methodological tools: discourse analysis and Mary Douglas’ ideas of purity/impurity. I am choosing these tools because they fit both my research questions and discoveries. Discourse analysis guides my research approach. It is a methodology that looks at language as “a social performance or a social action” that “both creates social phenomena and is representative of social phenomena” (Morgan 2010:1). Essentially, it is an approach that asks how certain ‘truths’ in society are created and maintained through communication between people. There are several different methodologies within   6 discourse analysis, but I will stay close to Michel Foucault’s use of “discourse” as a collection of related images and associations that get reproduced repeatedly throughout society, creating meanings that construct and organize the social world (Morgan 2010:23). Discourses are powerful. Regarding his image as a “melancholic historian of prohibitions and repressive power,” Foucault countered, “My aim is not to write the social history of a prohibition but the political history of the production of ‘truth’” (Foucault 1988:112). Foucault continued, “We are living in a society that, to a great extent, is marching ‘toward the truth’ – I mean, that produces and circulates discourse having truth as its function, passing itself off as such and thus attaining specific powers” (Foucault 1988:112). The images and associations within discourses are asserted as truth and in doing so formulate views of the world that guide individuals’ understandings and actions. I am interested in the discourses that have produced and maintained powerful “truths” about homosexuality and childhood. My goal is find discourses that extend beyond geographic location, religion, and academia in the United States, so I will focus on language used widely in the popular sphere: themes and symbols average American individuals encounter and perpetuate when they read and write about children and homosexuality. This will include many web-based communications, like blogs, newspaper articles, and comment feeds, reflecting where much of the current exchange of ideas is happening today in the United States. By looking at which thematic ideas appear across multiple media and the historical relationships between these themes, it is possible to discover how conceptual frameworks guide individuals’ everyday understandings of homosexuality and childhood. Discourse analysis is helpful for this thesis because it   7 requires consideration into such issues as how meanings spread and guide individual worldviews, why certain discourses are more resonant than others, and how new discourses can rise in resistance to established ones. Mary Douglas’ work on pollution informs my reading of these discourses about homosexuality and children, and prompts me think about how specific discourses are located within larger societal experiences of threat, hope, and change. Douglas did symbolic anthropology, meaning she studied how “people give meaning to their world and how this world is expressed in cultural symbols” (McGee and Warms 2008:484). Unlike other symbolic anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, Douglas went beyond mainly culturally specific descriptions of symbols to argue that all cultures are impacted by beliefs about social order, which are reflected and maintained through systems of purity and impurity (McGee and Warms 2008:483, Douglas 1966:2). Impurity or pollution, like taboo bodily fluids or forbidden foods and activities, symbolizes disorder, dangerously challenging social order even as they are defined against each other (Douglas 1966:3, 94). These systems of purity and impurity create boundaries that are defended when threatened. Furthermore, Douglas argues that a society’s boundary concerns, like those about body fluids or sexuality, do not operate in a vacuum. Instead they reflect the boundary concerns occupying the whole society. “The known dangers of society,” in other words, are mirrored in the construction of these cultural boundaries (Douglas 1966:121). External and internal pressures on populations can prompt increased defense of cultural ideas about purity and pollution. During the cold war era, for example, the disorder and pollution of homosexuality became a major concern because the United States feared   8 communist attack and invasion. Douglas is helpful because her work explains why certain behaviors are taboo, asks how cultural discourses reflect and draw from other societal experiences, and illuminates why discourses become important and defended at certain times. In my thesis, I am concerned with understanding the dominant ideas about the intersection of homosexuality and children and explaining why those particular ideas arose and persisted. Discourse analysis and ideas about purity and impurity provide groundwork for how those aims can be approached anthropologically. A Note About Scope: Why “Homosexuality” versus Other Categories One could argue that my focus on homosexuality to the exclusion of a more inclusive and flexible definition of non-heteronormative sexualities, which could include bisexuality, asexuality, pansexuality, or others, is too narrow. I know that nonheterosexual, non-heteronormative experiences cannot and should not be summarized by “homosexuality.” That is not my intention. I am choosing to follow the idea of same-sex sexual attraction specifically; homosexuality is traceable as a salient cultural category over time in the United States and is the focus of much attention today. Some of my conclusions may be applicable to, say, bisexuality or polyamory, but others may not. My focus is intentionally narrowed to a single conceptual category; tracing the full breadth of sexual diversity is a job far larger than this space allows. Likewise, some may take the opposite view and challenge the lumping of female and male homosexuality into one generic “homosexuality.” Grouping gay and lesbian identities presupposes a similarity of experience and meaning that is arguably too broad. Although I acknowledge this, my examination is not concerned with individual   9 experiences and opinions regarding sexuality but rather the broad categories Americans use to divide the world into order and disorder. Gays and lesbians are commonly lumped in the public mind, rightly or wrongly so, as “homosexuals” – threatening and dangerous to some, members of an oppressed minority to others. I hope and expect that my examination will inspire questions regarding discourses about other sexualities and the complex relationship between male and female homosexuality. I am certainly interested in those questions too, but they are not my focus here. Change in the United States and Why Children are Involved We almost have all the pieces we need to begin; we have a question (Why is homosexuality particularly contentious when children are involved?), a plan, some theoretical and methodological grounding, and a defined scope of analysis. The last piece we need is a little context. Conflicting discourses about children and homosexuality are battling at a fever pitch today. Before I explore what these discourses are and how they formed, it is important to consider what else is going on in the United States that might illuminate why cultural boundaries and associations between children and homosexuality are especially important in this historical moment. This context shows why I think this thesis is important now and how it relates to greater societal issues. Today, Americans face instability in their abilities to plan for the future and hold vastly differing conceptions of national identity as the power of the United States in the global sphere changes. The economy is still in the throws of a major recession that lost 23% of American workers their jobs, six years after the initial set of major financial   10 crises (Szeltner, Van Horn, and Zukin 2013:3). Internationally, the United States is losing its singular dominance as the global political and economic player. Meanwhile, the decade-long war in Iraq has raised the poignant question of what patriotism entails: is patriotism “defending” the country through violence, speaking out for “peace and justice,” or expressing support for American troops regardless of one’s perspective on the war? (Haislip 2008). Although the United States’ first African-American president was elected in 2009, every month a new conspiracy about President Obama’s religious and ethnic background emerges (see a list in Suebsaeng and Gilson 2012). The face of the United States, its identity and values, are changing and part of this process of change is a questioning of who Americans are and what the United States should represent both today and in the future. As Mary Douglas would point out, current cultural conflicts mirror this questioning by problematizing who is included in society and who is not. Abortion debates often hinge on deciding when a growing collection of cells becomes a person and thus a protected member of the community (Derr 2010). Capital punishment is controversial because there is disagreement over when a person can be forcibly killed and thus removed from society against their will. Immigration issues too are social boundary issues: who is allowed to join the country and under what conditions? Even the fervor over universal healthcare reveals conflict over societal belonging through issues of deservingness: do smokers or other people with voluntary health risks deserve aid from ‘healthy’ people? Are they, in a sense, part of us? (Cafferty 2011, Martin 2009, and Andre, Velasquez, and Mazur 1993). These conflicts are bound up with national identity. Some believe only immigrants who know or learn to speak English should be welcomed into the United   11 States. A Facebook page called “This is AMERICA. Speak ENGLISH!!!!!!!!!!!!” has over 22,500 “likes.” One post reads, “people come to America for the benefits, but don't invest in America by learning English … SUPPORT AMERICA'S LANGUAGE!!!” (This is AMERICA. Speak ENGLISH!!!!!!!!!!!! 2010). Using a similar but slightly more sophisticated argument, the American Civil Liberties Union opposes all capital punishment by arguing that it violates the United States Constitution ban on cruel and unusual punishment (American Civil Liberties Union 2012). The United States is engaged in a project of defining who Americans are and what is American justice. Gay rights debates are part of this negotiation of national identity. Historically, homosexuals have typically been viewed as outsiders or deviants from ‘normal’ heterosexual individuals that fit in the social order. Gay rights movements try to establish equal treatment between heterosexuals and homosexuals by asserting that sexual minorities are not harmful to society. While this view is gaining followers, there is insecurity about how far to go with the acceptance of homosexuality. Like John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory of “sticky” wages, cultural discourses are sticky: in times of change and anxiety, they can provide a reference point for order, so older ideas can push on new paradigms of truth that are becoming established. Anxiety over the changing meaning of homosexuality flares most strongly surrounding children. This makes sense. Children and childhood are some of the most value-laden symbols in American culture. Cross-historically and to an extent crossculturally as well, societal meanings surrounding children reveal ideals and anxieties about morality, order, and the present and future (Colls and Hörschelmann 2010:4, Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998:1-2). Philippe Bourgois, for example, studied the joy   12 surrounding new pregnancies and births in East Harlem, New York City, and found that parenthood is connected to greater concerns about power, love, economic survival, and the meaning of life in El Barrio. Additionally, the way children are socialized exposed the level to which drug dealing is normalized in the neighborhood (Bourgois 1998). Likewise, Mary Picone’s historical look at infanticide practices and beliefs in Japan reveals social anxieties about death, the future, and proper sexual, gender, and familial relationships (Picone 1998). As the United States is experiencing today, times of incredible social change tend to prompt increased concern over the socialization of youth (Stephens 1995:27). Contemporary panic about keeping children ‘normal’ is evident in the near daily coverage of childhood obesity statistics and the $1.7 billion that states spend nationwide every year on standardized testing to ensure children are receiving adequate education (Chingos 2012:1). The order of childhood itself is threatened by pressure to “grow up too fast.” Parenting magazines decry materialistic and sexualized advertising and marketing to “tweens,” a term first used to mean children on the cusp of becoming a teenager (13 to 19 years old), but now includes children as young as seven or eight years old (Moninger 2010). They argue that there is a “shrinking of childhood” as tweens experience pressure to get personal cell phones, wear make-up, and follow fashion and music trends (Moninger 2010). Meanwhile, some children as young as nine and ten years old are being treated like adults by being tried in adult criminal courts rather than receiving rehabilitation in juvenile correctional facilities (Schwartz 2010, PBS Frontline 2001). Again, these disruptions to the boundaries of childhood and adulthood have been very controversial. Head of the Juvenile Law Center Robert Schwartz protested transferring   13 children to adult courts in a CNN opinion article: “This is common sense. An 11-year-old is not an adult and should never be treated like one” (Schwartz 2010). Concerns about the socialization of youth, especially in regards to keeping them ‘normal’ children who will become ‘normal’ adults, are highly implicated in contemporary debates about homosexuality. Making a culturally acceptable space for gay- and lesbian-identified children means convincing the nation that the United States should both accept sexuality in children and normalize homosexuality as an adult identity. My work will show how this involves a major conflict and reordering of the symbols and images associated with both children and homosexuality.   14 Chapter 1: Sexuality Out of Place In the United States, sexual feelings and behaviors belong to adults, not children. “One of the unwritten laws of contemporary morality,” wrote Philippe Ariès, author of the classic work on the history of childhood, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime, “the strictest and best respected of all, requires adults to avoid any reference, above all any humorous reference, to sexual matters in the presence of children” (Ariès 1962:100). In the United States, the sexuality children experience, or are supposed to experience, is limited. The sexuality in storybooks and fairytales follows a script; it’s non-physical and heteronormative, neat and tight without child players. The classic fairytale goes, “as for Cinderella and the Prince, they lived happily ever after” (Sanderson 2002). One kiss and budding relationships are quickly transformed into true love and quick weddings. Attractions between children are often culturally coded and dismissed as temporary “puppy love.” True desire and full sexual identity are only culturally legible and acceptable in adulthood. In a 2011 blog post for Bay Area moms, for example, Stephanie Porter describes her reaction to her daughter’s crush on a classmate. “I mentioned her crush to her kindergarten teacher, for the laugh … I was tickled over my adorable daughters.” The sexuality of children is confided to playful, “sweet” phases when kids try on adult roles. Meanwhile, as I will explore soon, attractions between children and adults are concerned abnormal, exploitive, and abusive. Youth sexuality topics are overwhelmingly focused on the negative consequences of sexual activity in childhood: sexually transmitted diseases, rape and sexual exploitation, and poverty and lack of social mobility through teenage pregnancy (see   15 American Academy of Pediatrics 2012, FamilyDoctor.org 2010, Kaiser Family Foundation 2011, WebMD 2013). For example, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has facilitated outreach education programs for over a decade, centering around the slogan “Sex has consequences.” In 2012, 700,000 people participated in education programs on a national day to prevent teen pregnancy, which characterized pregnancy under the age of twenty as “too early” and a “tough issue” (National Campaign 2013). The National Campaign’s partner website for youth is named StayTeen, which implies pregnancy, part of the full expression of sexuality, is only appropriate in adulthood – a stage of life increasingly associated with older and older ages in the United States. People in their twenties are now considered to still be in a time of late childhood or youth, an “emerging” time before actual “young adulthood” in the 30s and 40s (Henig 2010). Though sexual exploration is a hallmark of this “emerging” time, sexuality in younger children is typically characterized as inappropriate and impure, especially before the age of fifteen or sixteen. Historical Origins of the Asexual Child The idea that sexuality should be absent from childhood is historically and culturally specific. Anxiety about sexual activity and expression in childhood only became dominant in Western culture in the last few centuries. A physician’s diary from early seventeenth century France about the young French prince Louis XIII reveals that “nobody showed any reluctance or saw any harm in jokingly touching the child’s sexual parts” (Ariès 1962:100). As Prince Louis grew up, this mother and other members of the royal court played with his penis and joked openly about sexual activities, even let him touch their genitals (Ariès 1962:100-102). Between the ages of five and six, Louis talked   16 to his physician Heroard about playing with one of his chambermaids, Mlle Mercier. Heroard wrote, “[Louis] told me that Mercier had a private as big as that (showing me his two fists) and that there was water inside” (Ariès 1962:102). Since the early seventeenth century the social role of children and the composition of families has changed in Western society. Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mae Austin’s beautiful America’s Children describes these changes primarily through photographs. As Thompson and Austin demonstrate, children and adults participated in very similar activities in the seventeenth century when European colonies were first established in what would become the United States. A family unit was considered to be everyone who inhabited a house or a farm, including servants and slaves. “Work was the basic purpose of the family” and children labored alongside older members of the household as peers (Thompson and Austin 2003:26). The Industrial Revolution, a period of major manufacture changes in the early nineteenth century, altered family and work environments for children. In the northeast, north central, south, and west regions of the United States, the percentage of the population that lived in urban areas doubled or more than doubled between 1860 and 1910 (Klein 2004:136). Meanwhile, death rates steadily declined and fertility rates fell from about 5.7% to about 3.2% from 1855 to 1914, changing family composition (Klein 2004:107, 109). Instead of laboring with their parents and other relatives, many children worked in factories under extremely poor working conditions (Thompson and Austin 2003:26, 130). By 1910, nearly two million children were estimated to be in the labor force; that number did not count children under the age of ten, children helping their parents on farms or in sweatshops, or children working before or after school hours   17 (Zelizer 1985:56). Even for kids who stayed home, home itself changed. Men (and women) increasingly took jobs that kept them away from the home during work hours (Thompson and Austin 2003:40). In the mid-1800s, the public educational system was established (Thompson and Austin 2003:168). Notably, the new school system moved away from the purely practical or religious-based education available previously. The education of children became a moral endeavor with the intention to “civilize” youth, especially in schools for Native American children (Thompson and Austin 2003:168). In 1889, commissioner of Indian affairs Thomas J. Morgan explained the benefits of ‘civilizing’ education for Native Americans. When we speak of the education of the Indian, we mean that comprehensive system of training and instruction which will convert them into American citizens … and with [“their white fellow-citizens”] enjoy the sweets of refined homes, the delight of social intercourse, the emoluments of commerce and trade, the advantages of travel, together with the pleasures that come from literature, science, and philosophy, and the solace and stimulus afforded by a true religion (Ellis 1994:87). Morgan’s explanation reveals a complete devaluation of Native American culture and religion, but it also outlines what education was supposed to do for all children: provide multidimensional intellectual development, a launching pad for a life of morality and economic and social success. By the end of the century, anti-child labor activists banded together with those pushing for education, and the accepted types of work for children changed (Zelizer 1985:58). Children definitively shifted from ‘doers’ laboring for the physical welfare of the family to ‘learners’ primarily tasked with moral and intellectual growth (Thompson and Austin 2003:177, Zelizer 1985:58). This change eventually applied to all children regardless of socioeconomic status (Zelizer 1985:58). Instead of working in fields or   18 factories alongside adults as producers, proper “growing up” involved societal surveillance and coaching through the school system, a major shift from the householdbased authority prevalent before the Industrial Revolution. Children and adults were separated physically and conceptually. The now familiar image of the idyllic childhood as separated from ‘real life’ adulthood solidified during this time (Thompson and Austin 2003:272). This shift has remained to this day. Children are often discussed as though they are in progress or draft versions of their future adult selves, rather than full individuals. Doctors, parents, and teachers use standardized “developmental milestones” to measure children’s linguistic, social, emotional, cognitive, and physical growth (see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2012, Talking Point 2010). Meanwhile, adult experiences – everything from financial success to poor health – are explained by factors in childhood (see Delaney and Smith 2012, Moffitt et al. 2011). Childhood has become important to ‘get right,’ in order to insure a child’s future success, happiness, and morality. Because childhood is now a space designated for conscious social molding of the child into its ‘adult’ form, the original positioning of the child becomes important. Chris Jenks’s Childhood (1996) draws out two central imaginings of children that have oscillated, even co-existed in Western thought: one of innocence and one of evil. In the Dionysian child model, the child is assumed to carry an initial “primal” corruption; it enters the world as a potential polluting force in human civilization (Jenks 1996:70-1). “Such children,” Jenks explains, “must not fall into bad company, establish bad habits, or develop idle hands – all of these contexts will enable outlets for the demonic force within, which is, of course, potentially destructive not just of the child but also of the adult   19 collectivity” (Jenks 1996:71). This model of the child is evident in Christian original sin, strict Puritan childrearing, and Sigmund Freud’s id, the “insatiable desire” associated with children (Jenks 1996:70-2). The Apollonian child, in contrast, is a model that associates a “natural goodness” with the child, an angelic innocence as yet untainted by the corrupted world (Jenks 1996:73). “Children in this image are not curbed nor beaten into submission, they are encouraged, enabled and facilitated” (Jenks 1996:73). This model is evident in contemporary celebration of children as unique, creative individuals, debates about abortion, and concern over ‘unfit’ parents contaminating children through HIV infection or drug addiction (Jenks 1996:73). Gill Valentine extends Jenks’ work to describe how both these models justify the exclusion of children from adult space, a material and cultural pattern in the United States since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of public education. The Dionysian child is “unruly,” a threat to the order of the adult space while the Apollonian child is vulnerable, “in need of protection from adults and the adult world” (Valentine 2010:24). Valentine sees both models at work in contemporary imaginings of children, though at times one perhaps more emphasized than the other (Valentine 2010:23-4). The transition between childhood and adulthood is marked by discipline to ensure children learn to behave in controlled, “adult-like” ways and protection to keep them from harm until they are “adult enough” to be responsible for themselves (Valentine 2010:24). Mandatory schooling, for example, restricts child behavior by enforcing discipline, order, and punctuality while insulating children for the majority of each weekday from the wider world (Valentine 2010:25). “Schools are places where children are both cared for and also contained” (Valentine 2010:25).   20 The physical and conceptual separation of children from adults has opened childhood to new cultural symbolism. Both the innocent child and the evil child are defined against adults and the adult world. The separation allows children to symbolize the anxieties and fears of adults simultaneously with adult desires and ideals. I believe it is this separation that feeds the opposing models of the child as at once innocent and at once evil. It is not about the child itself or any inherent difference between children and adults. Instead, the child in its separation from the physical and cultural spaces of adults allows it to become a symbol for change, the ever-present possibility of failure and societal collapse or positive change and growth. It is here in this nexus of childhood and potential social changes that youth sexuality, especially homosexuality, is dangerous. As the activities of children and adults grew increasingly separate, reproduction and marriage drew sexuality into the arena of adulthood creating an opposition between children and sexuality. Referring to the liberal sexual exposure of the young Prince Louis in the early seventeenth century, Ariès notes that “nowadays the physical contacts described by Heroard would strike us as bordering on sexual perversion and nobody would dare to indulge in them publicly” (Ariès 1962:103). Besides the acceptance of play that mimics ‘clean’ adult (hetero)sexual behaviors, pretending to be parents or acting out a wedding for example, activity and knowledge about sex and sexuality is restricted from children in order to protect their ‘natural’ innocence (Bruhm and Hurley 2004:ix). In Western society, “the ideal of a sexually innocent childhood is key to contemporary constructions of childhood” (Montgomery 2007:327). Homosexual feelings and sexual activity, heterosexual feelings and sexual activity – both are considered inappropriate in childhood. They are dangerous   21 because they cross the boundary between children and adults, violating order and polluting childhood. In the United States, sexuality in childhood is, to paraphrase Mary Douglas, matter out of place. To understand the specificity of this model of adulthood, childhood, and sexuality, we can consider the practices and beliefs in other cultures. Among the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, sexual activity in childhood is a necessary rite of passage for boys without which they cannot achieve mature adulthood (Herdt 1999:277). After being separated from their mothers and all other women between the ages of seven and ten, boys “ingest semen from older youths through oral sexual contacts” (Herdt 1999:59-60). The Sambia believe that ingesting semen is required for boys to grow into men who can produce their own semen and achieve secondary sex traits, like facial hair (Herdt 1999:59). Male sexual development involves a transition from exclusively homoerotic private experiences to heterosexual public relationships and eventually heterosexual monogamous or polygynous marriage (Herdt 1999:61, 199). The Canela, an Amerindian group in Brazil, also encourage their children to “have frequent and early sexual experience[s]” (Montgomery 2007:330). No taboos prevent children from watching others engage in sexual interactions (Montgomery 2007:330). Indeed, group sex with a sequence of intergenerational partners is part of annual festivals and a rite of passage activity for both girls and boys (Crocker and Crocker 1994:158, 165-6). Among the Canela, there is a “general atmosphere of joy and fun surrounding extramarital sex,” which children are exposed to and involved in from the age of six or seven (Crocker and Crocker 1994:166). This culture of frequent and extramarital sexuality extends into reproduction. A fetus is thought to benefit from   22 semen the mother receives from other men; semen “becomes a biological part of the growing baby” (Montgomery 2007:330). In contrast, children in the United States are intentionally isolated from exposure to sexual activity. An American child usually sleeps in a “specialized room, preferably one that is solely her or his own” (Pader 1993:126). Spatial separation is “not arbitrary,” but rather reflects “larger societal reconceptualizations of appropriate ways to act and see,” according to Ellen Pader (1993:118). Since the late 18th century, American homes have been divided into spaces designated for specific people, such as guests, family friends, children, and adults (Pader 1993:118). The boundaries of bedrooms are particularly guarded with walls and even lockable doors, and the rooms commonly open into a central hallway rather than being nested into each other (Pader 1993:120). While homes in the 1950s began including more open floor plans and fewer formal rooms designated for adult entertaining, Pader notes that adult-child separation was simultaneously maintained through the introduction of private bathrooms in parent bedrooms and by placing children’s bedrooms across the house from parent bedrooms (1993:120). Sleeping away from their parents keeps children from seeing or hearing sex, much less experiencing it firsthand, until they are ‘ready’ for it in young adulthood (Montgomery 2007:328). Children as a Refuge from the Adult World I believe that sexuality in childhood is especially threatening right now because adults are struggling to agree on the boundaries of healthy sexuality for themselves. In the United States opinions range widely on such issues as the acceptability of sex before marriage, single parenthood, extramarital sexual affairs, swinging between multiple   23 sexual partners, prostitution, and pornography (see polling data in Saad 2010, Gallup Jr. 2003, and Kinsey Institute 2002). Sexuality is socially most comfortable within the context of heterosexual, heteronormative marriage; outside of marriage disagreement flourishes over the boundaries of proper or healthy sexuality. However, there seems to be a consensus that sexuality in childhood is inappropriate. The debates and disagreements over adult sexuality are occurring in the aftermath of immense cultural change. In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of events pushed the delinking of sex and marriage: the beginning of affirmative action for women, the removal of the ban on abortion, and increasing access to birth control and sex education (Fejes 2008:3-4). In this sexual unmooring, children have represented the limit of sexual leniency. For example, when the first national debates about gay rights began in the mid1970s, an organization named Save Our Children started in Dale County, Florida, to repeal an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual preference (Fejes 2008:2). One Save the Children supporter said, “The sexual counter revolution began in Dale County, Florida where people drew the line about how far they’re going to let the permissive society take over their lives” (Fejes 2008:4). Save Our Children successfully caused a repeal and went on to influence anti-gay rights campaigns nationally (Fejes 2008:4). The association between sexual permissiveness and threatened children remains salient today. Childhood is a place where anxieties about changing sex and gender mores find some agreement across the vastly different religious and social beliefs in the United States. Sexual activity among and around children is understood a sign that opening sexuality beyond marriage has gone too far.   24 As if to demonstrate the depth of the taboo on child sexuality, President Bill Clinton forced the resignation of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in December 1994 after she expressed support for teaching children about masturbation (Jehl 1994). Elders later commented, “[T]o study masturbation would be to admit its role in our lives — one that many of us are not comfortable with. Instead, we discourage the practice in our children, dispensing cautionary tales that read like Steven King novellas” (Elders and Kilgore 1997). Keeping Sex Out of Childhood To protect their ‘innocence,’ many steps have been taken to limit children’s sexual activity and exposure. The sexual activity that children are see and engage in among the Sambia and Canela, as well as Louis XIII’s early experiences in early seventeenth century France, would be shocking in the United States and characterized as perverse and abusive. The American Psychological Association’s description of child sexual abuse includes “fondling a child’s genitals,” “oral-genital contact,” and “noncontact abuse, such as exposure [and] voyeurism” (2012:1). While these acts are not described as inherently violent or coerced, the mere involvement of a child makes such contact or exposure culturally inappropriate in the United States. The use of the term “molestation” to refer to the sexual assault and abuse of children emerged in the United States at the end of World War II – a time when “deviant” sexuality became increasingly pathologized as I will explore in depth in chapter two. The term legitimized legal action against people who have sexual contact with children because “molestation” had already been used since the early fifteenth century in English and American law to describe harassment though unrightful land possession or use and   25 the intentional disturbance or injury of another person (Oxford English Dictionary 2002). “Child molester” is now a common term for a person who has sexual contact with children. While the contact may not be violent, the term itself invokes images of harassment, assault, and attack (Feelgood and Hoyer 2008:34). This equation of sexuality in childhood with violence and harm is expressed and maintained through a variety of laws and practices in the United States today; a best example is statutory rape laws. The criminalized sexual activity referred to as child sex abuse includes both unwanted sexual activity (a classification that also applies to adults) and sexual intercourse with or between ‘minors,’ regardless of whether it is consensual or nonconsensual. Minors are young people who are under the ‘legal age of consent,’ an age that varies by state. Intended to protect white female “premarital chastity” in Colonial America, statutory rape laws originally only applied to virginal Caucasian girls whose ‘purity’ was considered a commodity or a property that transferred ownership at marriage (Cocca 2004:11). Racial divisions were influential, and to an extent still are, in the application of these laws as African-American females were cast as promiscuous and undeserving of the same legal rights as Caucasians, while African-American males were stereotyped as “uncontrollable rapists of white women” (Cocca 2004:13). The age of consent rose from ten or twelve years old to sixteen or eighteen across the United States in the early 20th century (Cocca 2004:12-14). At the time, books and pamphlets were calling frantic attention to a new social threat, “white slavery”: the idea that working class Caucasian females were being kidnapped, forced, and coerced into prostitution in urban red light districts (Connelly 1980:114). Mark Thomas Connelly argues that narratives of white slavery sprang from a union of two “obvious facts” of life   26 at the turn of the century: “the migration of rural and small town young women to the cities in search of jobs and social opportunities, and the existence of open and teeming red-light districts in these same cities” (1980:115). For example, a story in Fighting the Devil’s Triple Demons: The Traffic in Innocent Girls (1911) describes a girl named Helen as an innocent eighteen-year-old “little child” who abandons her loving parents to move to “the great city.” In the city, Helen meets Mr. Laurier. He introduces her to alcohol and “late suppers,” eventually selling Helen to a brothel where her mental health deteriorates as she longs for home. Helen dies in a state asylum (Connelly 1980:121-2). Concern to protect female sexuality as property shifted to a discourse about protecting female child morality in the face of urban ills (Cocca 2004:16). The idea of “male as aggressor and female as victim” was left intact (Cocca 2004:16). As widespread as these narratives were, studies from the time found that most prostitutes were not children at all, but women in their early twenties who had begun engaging in sex work after the age of eighteen (Connelly 1980:127). Moreover, a 1918 study in San Francisco discovered that none of the 320 prostitutes interviewed mentioned white slavers or a slave trafficking system when asked about their reasons for being in sex work, results that matched the results of investigations in other cities (Connelly 1980:130). Connelly says that the image of “white slaves” as children simplified the complex issues of urban prostitution and changing boundaries of adult sexuality to a problem of “victimized children,” an image that was “highly effective in terms of melodramatic and sentimental appeal” (Connelly 1980:127). The use of children was a particularly effective method of spreading awareness and anxiety about female migration and prostitution because the intersection of childhood   27 and sexuality was already shot with danger. The confluence of children and sexuality remains taboo today. In the midst of critical analysis about how prostitution should not have been simplified to “ruined children,” Connelly himself reduces child sexuality to exploitation. He jumps into the present tense and writes, “concern with actual child prostitution and exploitation is admirable” (Connelly 1980:127). In the 1970s, statutory rape laws changed to include sexual contact other than penile-vaginal intercourse, broadened to permit all sexes to be victims rather than assume a female victim, and removed an earlier emphasis on proving resistance (Cocca 2004:17). Second-wave feminists strongly advocated for the gender-neutral language and broad definitions of child sexual assault, hoping to “symbolize a rejection of the patriarchal and stereotypical view of what sex crimes consisted of” (Cocca 2004:17). Similarly, the removal of the requirement to prove resistance was hoped to aid prosecutions (Cocca 2004:17). “Catch[ing] coerced or manipulated sex with the underage” was easier when statutory rape cases merely had to establish that the victim was under the age of consent and the participants were not married at the time (Cocca 2004:18). Children were “presumed incapable of giving informed and valid consent to sexual activity” (Cocca 2004:9). This presumption persists today. Statutory rape laws criminalize all sexual relations with a minor, regardless of the minor’s desires. Often conceptualized as forbidding sex between children and adults, statutory rape laws also apply to sexual relations between minors. The perpetrator, even if he or she is the same age as the victim (often still assumed to be the female), can be charged with a felony or misdemeanor depending on state law (Cocca 2004:10). Modern statutory rape laws “may prevent   28 abuse, but may also punish consensual nonmarital conduct and label it ‘abuse,’ ” argues political historian Carolyn E. Cocca (2004:22). By 2000, gender-neutral language was included in all state statutory rape laws, which read “that ‘any person’ who has sex with ‘any person’ under the age of consent has committed a criminal act” (Cocca 2004:22). As the laws stand now, “the teenage boyfriend or girlfriend of a 15-year-old and the adult stranger who molests a 5-year-old both may be required to register as sex offenders,” face prison time, and correctional rehabilitation (Cocca 2004:22). An interesting case study of this situation is occurring in New Albany, Indiana. Two men were arrested on March 25, 2013, after an unidentified 13-year-old girl accused them of sexual abuse. In an article published the following day, Gary Popp reported that the girl said William Hardison, 44, forced her to perform oral sex on him about twenty times since she was six years old. She said that Aaron R. Knight, 18, had sex with her when she was 12 years old (Popp 2013). The article explains the case against Knight as follows. [T]he child said that she and Knight, along with some friends, were playing a game of truth or dare and an unidentified person dared her to have intercourse with Knight in a bathroom. According to her statements, the child and Knight then went to the bathroom, where he told her to remove her pants and the two began to have sex, until she told him to stop and he complied … Knight told officers that he and the child did have intercourse during a game of truth or dare (Popp 2013). While Hardison is accused of forcing the girl to have oral sex, Knight stopped having intercourse with her when she asked to stop. It is not clear from the article whether she felt coerced into having sexual intercourse with Knight, but it is made clear that she was under the age of consent; she is legally considered as lacking the ability or developmental advancement to consent to sexual activity. Hardison and Knight are   29 treated as though they committed the same crime. Hardison is charged with two counts of B felony child molesting, Knight one count (Popp 2013). Keeping sex out of children’s lives is also evident in the everyday experiences of American children. For example, since 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, History) has provided a rating system for films based on their appropriateness for child audiences. These ratings influence the movies children can see in theaters and at school and which movies many parents consider appropriate for home viewing. Sexual content is directly correlated with age in the rating system. As young people grow older, it becomes more acceptable for them to view sexual content. The presence of nudity factors prominently, monitored because of its allusion to sexual bodies and behaviors. “More than brief nudity” jumps the film’s rating to PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned). If the nudity is sexually oriented, the film automatically receives a minimum rating of R and cinemas restrict children’s access without parental accompaniment until age seventeen. Only films with G or PG ratings have no or brief nudity and are considered “family friendly” (MPAA, What Each Rating Means). For example, the PG rated film Life of Pi (2012) contains “mild flirting between a teenage couple [and] women in swimwear” (Bozdech 2013). The PG rating comes from emotional and scary thematic content; the flirting and nudity are mild, what children would likely see normally in their lives (Bennett 2013). By contrast, PG-13 rated Titanic (1997) contains kissing and implies sexual intercourse with suggestive dialogue and steamy windows. There is also a scene in which a female character asks to be drawn nude. However, her bare breasts are only shown briefly and the nudity is arguably nonsexual since it is in the context of creating artwork. Titanic’s sexual content is vague   30 enough that children may not understand the implications of dialogue and other cues that the two main characters have a sexual relationship. R rated Shakespeare in Love (1998), however, leaves much less ambiguity. There are multiple sexual encounters that involve prolonged nudity and squeaking bedsprings, ‘adult’ actions culturally inacceptable around children and thus for children to view on film. If children are accidentally exposed to or interested in sexuality, adults are expected to mitigate the situation’s effects. Advice columns circulate on the best ways to counteract children’s exposure to the arguably over-sexualized adult world. Even the most relaxed advisors invoke honesty through a context of reestablishing a boundary between children and (adult) sexuality. A good example is from Fred Kaeser, the 19842010 Director of Health for the New York City Department of Education, which has the largest public school system in the United States. He writes to parents and caregivers, “In some homes kids are only a click away from seeing sexual intercourse in all its possible permutations. In fact, by the time a child reaches puberty, she or he has likely been exposed to thousands if not tens of thousands of sexualized messages” (2011). Kaeser advises parents to counter the harm of children’s exposure by actively monitoring their children’s understanding of what they see and hear. A six year old once asked Kaeser, in reference to President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, “Did the president really pull his pants down and have that lady kiss his privates?” Kaeser says he replied as parents should to such “shocking” questions. “Well, you know kids, as strange and as weird as it sounds, there are some adults who love each other who will do that.” He explains, “I put the behavior of oral sex into an adult context where it certainly belongs, and I attached the value of love to it” (2011). Oral sex, like all   31 sexual content, may inappropriately invade the environments of children, but parental guidance can enforce the proper cultural scripts to make sexuality an activity and identity of adults, not children. Inappropriate sexual exposure is a grave societal and parental concern. Interestingly, it is also a recourse to explain the initiation of sexual interest or activity in children. Anthropologist Roger Lancaster describes this phenomenon. “Suspicions of abuse can be aroused when children express curiosity about sex, use profane language, sketch anatomically correct drawings, masturbate, attempt to catch a glimpse of naked adults, play doctor, or engage in sexual play with other children” (Lancaster 2011:258). Such ‘unnatural’ sexual knowledge and drive cannot originate from the child’s innocence, so questions arise about external factors pushing the child into faster sexual development. Secret Sexuality: A Disconnect Between Culture and Experience While the idea is taboo in the United States, sexuality does appear in the daily lives of children across the country. Children have feelings and experiences with bodies, sex, and attraction. Little comprehensive data on early sexual experiences is available outside the topic of child abuse. However, dissenting voices find space to speak in anonymous spaces. Experience Project is one such space. It is a free online social network, founded in 2007, that describes itself as “a comfortable and supportive place for individuals to share and connect with others around the things that matter to them most” (Experience Project 2013). The concept is that sharing experiences and feelings, such as “I want to have a baby” and “I think about God all the time,” is cathartic and beneficial to others   32 who may be in a similar position. Sharing your identity is not required and most users do not use their real names. The website is hugely popular with over 5 million users and 11 million unique visits every month (Kanjoya 2013). Over five thousand three hundred Experience Project users have joined a group for people who had sexual experiences in childhood. One female in her forties shared a story about the fun and excitement of exploring genitalia and masturbation with a cousin from the ages of four to six. “That was some of the best playtime I ever had as a kid!” she wrote (Experience Project 2012). A recent comment on the story from another Experience Project user accurately summarizes the sentiment of the entire comment thread: “What you experienced when you were young is far frome [sic] being rare. As you can see from the many comments, many of us had simmular [sic] experiences, with siblings, cousins, and neighborhood playmates.” Experience Project has a feature that allows group members to evaluate the shared experience or feeling. The results of the ongoing survey are posted in a sidebar. Seventy-six percent of respondents evaluated their sexual experiences in childhood as a “good experience.” Sexuality in childhood may be more common, and more of a positive experience, than culturally permissible. Puberty: (Hetero)sexuality Becomes Acceptable Puberty is a significant turning point in the cultural transition from childhood into adulthood. This is a time when physical bodily changes occur to allow reproduction, such as male sperm production and female menstruation. In the United States, these changes are accompanied by a new social role for youth – teenagehood, marked by mood swings, increased freedoms, and interest in sexuality. TeensHealth, a website written for   33 youth, describes puberty as a time of “new, confusing feelings about sex” caused by the release of “adult” reproductive hormones. For some, however, the feelings are not new. The ability to voice sexual interest is new. A common theme in Experience Project stories about childhood sexual activity is hiding from parents or other adults and anxiety about discovery. Puberty, the introduction of a new physical ability to reproduce, is the cultural beginning of sexuality, and thus the ending of childhood. The puberty construction of sexual development makes children protoheterosexuals even in their sexual innocence. The proper transition from an imagined asexual childhood to a openly sexual adulthood is through heterosexual reproductive abilities. The development of sexualities untied to reproduction, like homosexuality, is disregarded in this cultural paradigm (Bruhm and Hurley 2004:xxv). If sexuality ‘begins’ when the body becomes able to reproduce, then homosexuality has no ‘logical’ origin, leading us back to the stalemate stated in the introduction over whether homosexuality is inborn or caused by environmental factors. The recognition of alternative sexualities (anything other than 100% straight as artist iO Tillett Wright says) destabilizes the boundary dividing pre-pubescent asexual children from sexual adults because explanations for the origin of alternative sexualities tend to suggest that asexual childhood is a cultural construction, an ideal that is incongruent with lived experiences. For example, being born with a sexual identity or orientation suggests that one’s preferences could be known before puberty. Alternatively, becoming homosexual through environmental influences suggests that children are not on a natural course to heterosexuality. Instead they may be conditioned into their sexual preferences and malleable in their desires.   34 Now, I will turn to origin stories of homosexuality. How has the existence of homosexuality been reconciled within the paradigm of asexual childhood? One dominant conception today frames homosexuality as a sickness, an infecting force that turns ‘normal’ heterosexual or proto-heterosexuals into immoral, aggressive social menaces. This idea was established in the cold war era, a time of incredible national anxiety about communist invasion. In chapter two, I will trace this history of homosexuality as a harmful deviance and explain how children have been protected from ‘catching’ homosexuality.   35 Chapter 2: Containing Deviance Intolerance of same-sex sexual activity has a long history in the United States; for example, all original thirteen colonies applied the death penalty to male homosexual activity and at least one colony similarly punished female homosexual activity (Crompton 1976:277). It was not until World War II and the cold war era, however, when the meaning of homosexuality transitioned from primarily an individualized sin or abnormality to an infection that threatened the entire nation. A very particular idea took hold of the United States in this time, the idea that ‘deviant’ sexual activities – essentially defined as any sexual activities outside of heterosexual, heteronormative marital intercourse – threatened the security and safety of society (Fejes 2008:14). Homosexuality became problematized in the public mind to a greater extent than it had before; it became a national security concern. It was a weakness, a sickness that exposed the country to communist infiltration. Gay rights movements since the mid-1970s have tried to fight this conception of homosexuality threatening society. In this chapter, I will explore the image of homosexuality as a societal sickness from which children need protection. This cultural paradigm continues to prove prevalent in today’s conflicts surrounding children and homosexuality. Historical Origins of the Deviant Homosexual When ‘deviant’ sexuality became threatening, major changes were happening in American families and American society. The decade of the 1940s saw the largest proportional rise in female labor force participation to male participation in the twentieth century. As 16 million men mobilized for service in World War II, women took their places at home (Acemoglu et al. 2004:499). Social dislocation from the world wars and   36 the Great Depression pulled families open, allowing individuals new mobility separate from the family unit (Penn 1994:364). World War II was closely followed by the cold war era, a period of incredible national anxiety about atomic attack and communist infiltration, anxiety about the nation’s borders. The upheaval in social organization continued to grew as the country made massive efforts to guard itself against attack and internal subversion, including building bomb shelters and reporting suspicious activities of neighbors and colleagues. Controlling sexual behaviors became one basis from which the anxiety about changing social organization could be expressed and managed (Fejes 2008:14, May 1989:81). Sexuality intersected with the social changes of the time. Familial instability and the change in women’s economic status provoked fears of “sexual chaos” after World War II (May 1989:81). In her book Homeward Bound, Elaine Tyler May argues that in the cold war era “the self-contained home held out the promise of security in an insecure world” (May 1989:ix). The United States was obsessed with protecting its national borders during the cold war era. This translated into an intense societal focus on protecting the borders of families. Families were seen as the first line of national defense. Strong families produced “tough men” able to lead the nation and resist subversive communist tactics through aggressive masculinity and hardness (May 1989:86). This image was diametrically opposed to that of communism, which was “something secret, sweaty and furtive like nothing so much, in the phrase of one wise observer of Russia, as homosexuals in a boys school,” according to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a historian and social critic at the time (May 1989:86).   37 “Strong families required two essential ingredients: sexual restraint outside the marriage and traditional gender roles in marriage” (May 1989:86). Women were expected to be subservient, resourceful wives and resist coddling their children into weakness, and men were expected to command their family units and the nation as a whole (May 1989:84, 86). Resisting the chaos of communist invasion was reflected in efforts to eliminate post-World War II gender chaos by reestablishing traditional gender roles: man as protector and authority figure, woman as helpful but restrained mother. Meanwhile, all non-marital sexual activity, including homosexuality, was cast as deviant, abnormal, and contagious (May 1989:82-3). Moral weakness could be passed from individual to individual, like subversive thoughts and actions. ‘Deviant’ sexuality became harmful sexuality: harmful both for the individual’s moral fiber and for the security of the entire country. The image of the contagious homosexual spreading weakness and perversion dramatically differed with earlier depictions of homosexuals as engaged in “companionable” relationships – like lesbian couples as “ladies” simply living quiet lives together (Penn 1994:367). It was only when non-marital sexuality became a sign of chaos and contagion that the image of the jealous, aggressive lesbian and gay man were introduced (Penn 1994:367). Prior to the cold war era, homosexuals were commonly considered abnormal, but not dangerous. Before the late 1940s, a typical image of homosexuality was “the fairy”: the openly effeminate but ultimately benign gay man who adopted female mannerisms, dress, and names (Fejes 2008:11). While explicit depiction of homosexuality in Hollywood films was prohibited, “sissy” non-masculine male characters were common as sidekicks and “signifiers of urban culture, mixing   38 sophistication and foppishness” (Fejes 2008:11). The gay ‘fairy’ was non-threatening; fairy characters were characterized by softness and weakness and provoked laughter rather than fear or distrust. Fairies were not viewed as aggressive recruiters or even openly sexual at all (Fejes 2008:12). For example, Jack Benny was a popular radio “sissy” whose trademark was his effeminate style, but explicit reference to sexuality on his show was rare. Benny was more direct about his sexuality when he performed at military bases during World War II, which was popular among his male audiences. Benny joked about the placement of new recruits, “If you were a mailman, you were put in the infantry: if you were a cowboy, you went into the cavalry, and if you were a mechanic, you became an engineer. How I ever ended up on a ferry [sic] boat, I’ll never know” (Fejes 2008:12). This benign image of homosexuality completely changed in the cold war era when ‘proper’ sexuality became a national necessity. This change is evident in a wellreceived Journal of Social Hygiene article from 1951 about the effects of atomic attack by physician Charles Walter Clarke. Clarke warned, Following an atom bomb explosion, families would become separated and lost from each other in confusion. Supports of normal family and community life would be broken down … there would develop among many people, especially youths … the reckless psychological state often seen following great disasters. Under such conditions, moral standards would relax and promiscuity would increase (May 1989:81). In the event of an atomic attack, Clarke recommended preparing large supplies of penicillin to treat the predicted “1,000 percent increase” in sexually transmitted diseases and “strict policing … vigorous repression of prostitution, and measures to discourage promiscuity, drunkenness, and disorder” (May 1989:81). Elaine Tyler May points out how Clarke’s concerns “centered not on death and destruction or psychological damage,   39 but on the potential for sexual chaos” when families were separated after an attack (May 1989:81). Sexual chaos was a fear that extended far beyond the consequences of an atomic attack. Sexuality outside of marriage was characterized as weak and immature because it channeled focus and energy away from the important task of maintaining tight family units to structure and defend the nation and because it revealed a susceptibility to sexual weakness that could be exploited by “seductive women who worked for the communists” (May 1989:82-3). Communist infiltration was a big concern at the time as evidenced by the thick files the Federal Bureau of Investigation compiled on suspicious people and individuals seeking government employment. These files included detailed notes on sexual behavior, which was considered legitimate material for investigation. May explains, “sexual ‘deviants’ were allegedly security risks because they could be easily seduced, blackmailed, or tempted to join subversive organizations, since they lacked the will and moral stamina to resist” (May 1989:83). Furthermore, ‘deviants’ were thought to be able to easily spread their sexual perversions, potentially destroying all of society. Homosexuals were considered particularly aggressive. The United States Senate issued a report in 1950 called Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government, which warned, “one homosexual can pollute a Government office.” The report said that homosexuals “lack the emotional stability of normal persons,” which “makes them susceptible to the blandishments of the foreign espionage agent.” Additionally, the report said that a homosexual had “corrosive influence upon his fellow employees” (PBS Frontline 2013). These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices. This is particularly true in the case of young and impressionable people who might come under the influence of a pervert.   40 Government officials have the responsibility of keeping this type of corrosive influence out of the agencies under their control (PBS Frontline 2013). While the Congressional report uses the male pronoun, female homosexuals were similarly problematic. In 1958, allegations of widespread homosexuality at the Women’s Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham prompted a Special Legislative Committee report, which concluded that “aggressive homosexuals and trouble makers … indoctrinated the new admissions [to the facility]” (Penn 1994:368). The report recommended reducing new inmates’ homosexual ‘exposure’ by relocating the receiving area for new admissions away from homosexuals and “belligerent nonconformists” (Penn 1994:368). During the cold war period, homosexuality was becoming visible in ways it had not before. Social dislocation from the depression and world wars allowed homosexual individuals to form small urban communities at accelerated rates (Fejes 2008:13, Penn 1994:364). The aggressive depiction of homosexuality was in part a response to the growth of these new communities. Homosexuality appeared more prevalent than it had before, and more threatening as the boundaries of the family and nation became increasingly important (Fejes 2008:15). Psychiatrists, sociologists, and law enforcement officials began to “define and examine homosexuality as a ‘problem’” (Fejes 2008:13). The image of homosexuality as an undesirable sickness was exacerbated when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) included it in their first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-1) in 1952 (Fejes 2008:15). Since advising the military during World War II, psychiatry had grown into a major cultural authority (Penn 1994:363). The APA classified homosexuality as a sociopathic personality deviation (Fejes 2008:15).   41 Individuals could develop homosexuality if they experienced certain childhood factors, such as maternal coddling or alternately maternal dominance, lack of proper gender role models, stress from “modern life,” or open discussion of sexuality (Fejes 2008:15, May 1989:84). Mothers were encouraged to be restrained and feminine, and the criminal justice system was tasked with the policing of American streets, the corners and alleys where the public threat of aggressive sexual predators roamed (May 1989:84, Penn 1994:363). Sexual deviance was circling; homosexuals were thought to be especially insatiable in their sickness, ever searching for more innocents to tempt into their Communist-inviting ranks (Penn 1994:367, May 1989:83). The APA said homosexuality was “characterized by an absence of distress or anxiety despite the presence of a profound pathology” (Fejes 2008:15). Thus, one of the most problematic kinds of homosexual was the known homosexual who denied that there was any need to change his or her sexual behaviors; denial of his or her own social disruption was “a certain sign of mental illness” (Fejes 2008:15). Suspected homosexuals were in some ways even worse because of the high level of fear about subversive and secret activity during the cold war era. Known homosexuals at least could be monitored and denied employment or access to children. Children and the Adult Predator Children were thought to be especially vulnerable to harm through exposure to homosexuals. For children, the threat was two-fold: children could be confused from proper heterosexuality and pushed into unnaturally early sexual development, as I will show soon. Since the cold war era, anxiety about homosexuality around children has been contained in the cultural figure of the adult homosexual predator.   42 This figure was created in part through a linguistic conflation. In the cold war era, the word pervert could refer to practically any sexual ‘deviance’ or ‘chaos,’ including both adults in consensual same-sex relationships and “violent criminals who raped and murdered children” (May 1989:82). The behaviors became associated. The perverted person and their supposed potential to negatively affect children are also associated linguistically. ‘Pervert’ is a noun, an adjective, and a verb. For over five hundred years, ‘pervert’ has meant or described a person who has “turned from good to evil,” left a ‘true’ system for a false one, like heterosexuality for homosexuality (Oxford English Dictionary 2005a). But since several hundred years before that, ‘pervert’ has been used as a verb: to interfere with or distort the correct order or process (Oxford English Dictionary 2005b). Homosexuality became a threat to the safety of children because homosexuals were not only ‘perverted,’ but had the ability to ‘pervert.’ The continuing separation of adult and child social spheres heightened concern about how and where adults and children came in contact, for example in schools and youth groups. Respondents to a Kinsey Institute survey called Sex and Morality in the U.S. in 1970 felt that schoolteacher was the least acceptable profession for homosexual men. Three in four of the survey respondents agreed that homosexuals would be “dangerous as teachers or youth leaders, because they try to get sexually involved with children” (Klassen, Williams, and Levitt 1989:178). Even people who otherwise expressed relatively little or no “antihomosexual attitudes” still feared that homosexuals would molest or convert their children to the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ (Klassen, Williams, and Levitt 1989:179, 182). Within the decade, no direct contact between children and homosexual adults was even necessary to promote social anxiety: “the mere presence of   43 homosexuals in the vicinity of children was alleged to have corrosive, harmful effects” (Lancaster 2011:41-42). Fear about the wellbeing of children around homosexuality has persisted even as other opinions and associations with homosexuality have shifted. Homosexuality is still deeply associated with sexual offense and physical assault, “the exceptional, unspeakable, irreparable act of harm against children,” threating children’s physical, emotional, developmental, and moral health (Lancaster 2011:91, 87). Although homosexuality is becoming more of an identity than a disease since the cold war, the fear of the homosexual around children still colors the application of child sex abuse laws (Lancaster 2011:17). Roger Lancaster details a case that personally affected him, that of a gay schoolteacher who was wrongfully convicted of inappropriately touching students. In both the criminal allegations against him and his treatment in the media, the teacher was made into “a caricature of the archetypal homosexual fondler of children” (Lancaster 2011:122). Homosexuality is still perceived by some as a “physical and psychic threat to children,” which can create “vicious cycles” of victimization as abused children grow into abusers themselves (Lancaster 2011:38). While common in the public mind, the conclusion that homosexuals, especially gay adult men, desire and attempt to seduce children into homosexuality is not supported in scientifically rigorous research on child sexual abuse (see a review in Stevenson 2000). Michael Stevenson concludes that “coercive sexual behavior by a same-sex adult” during childhood does not determine a child’s eventual sexual orientation (Stevenson 2000:14). He emphasizes that homosexuals are attracted to same-sex adults whereas pedophiles are attached to children of the same or opposite gender. The two cannot be conflated;   44 “numerous empirical studies support the conclusion that a gay man is no more likely than a straight man to perpetrate sexual activity with children” (Stevenson 2000:8). The “myth” of predatory homosexuals, Stevenson argues, does not help increase children’s safety from sexual contact with adults (Stevenson 2000:15). Examples of the Predator/Contagion Model of Homosexuality Today Despite any studies disproving the ‘myth’ of the homosexual predator, many Americans continue to be gripped by the idea that children need to be protected from homosexuality. This phenomenon seems to stem from continuing anxiety about national and familial borders. The homosexual predator is both an insider and an outsider, a deeply dangerous figure who can hide by somehow blending into the crowd. The homosexual predator is similar to the Muslim terrorist in this way. Since the Twin Towers attacks on September 11, 2001, Muslim-Americans have faced death threats, violence, and vandalism (Ali-Karamali 2012). Even eight years after the attacks, thirtyone percent of Americans reported that their opinion of Islam is “not favorable at all,” despite widespread condemnation of the acts by Muslim leaders and believers (Gallup Center for Muslim Studies 2010, Ali-Karamali 2012). Just as being Muslim has been cast as equivalent to being a terrorist in disguise, identifying as a homosexual has been viewed as equivalent to being a child predator in disguise. Maintaining strength in ‘normalcy’ has created strongly moralized categories of acceptable religiosities and sexualities. The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) policy against accepting openly homosexual members and leaders is an example of contemporary controversy over homosexuality and its supposed ability to confuse and corrupt children. Since the late 1970s, the BSA, an   45 organization with a membership of 2.7 million scouts and one million adult leaders, has maintained a ban on homosexual leaders, scouts, and volunteers (Birkey 2012, Boy Scouts 2011). The first public insistence of BSA discrimination against homosexuals seems to have been in the spring of 1980. Timothy Curran, an Eagle Scout and registered Scout leader, asserted that he should be able to take a male date to senior prom in Oakland, California, and local newspapers covered the issue (Mechling 2001:207). Curran received notice from his local BSA council that his membership was terminated due to his open declaration of homosexuality, “a condition the organization (he was told) considered immoral and inappropriate as a role model for young men” (Mechling 2001:207). Court lawsuits from Curran and others protesting the exclusion of homosexuals from Boy Scout membership and leadership positions grew over the following decades. The U.S. Supreme Court finally considered the policy in 2000. The Supreme Court was split 5-4 and ended up defending BSA membership restrictions on the grounds of free speech and free association (Mechling 2001:213). In July 2012, fresh controversy erupted when a BSA executive committee announced the policy was reviewed and would continue (Birkey 2012). The BSA official line is generalized and vague; “sexuality is not part of the Scouts.” The BSA does not “endeavor to teach about sex” (Mazzuca and Perry 2012). Scouts are presumably exposed to thousands of heterosexual leaders, but that is normalized and not considered to be teaching “about sex.” The kind of sexuality the BSA objects to is not simply homosexuality, but explicit homosexuality, people who are honest about being in homosexual relationships. The presence of open homosexuals in scout troops would   46 legitimize homosexuality and would therefore “teach” children that a variety of sexual preferences are acceptable. A new organization called OnMyHonor: Keep Sex and Politics Out of the Boy Scouts uses this line of argumentation explicitly, defending the BSA ban as fair because “discreet” homosexual members are already permitted in the organization. Allowing open homosexuality is equated to promotion of gay agendas. The group’s founder John Stemberger said, "What they want is full-blown gay activism in scouting, and that’s what they can’t have under the current policy” (Huffpost Gay Voices 2013). Supporters of the BSA ban generally do not believe homosexuality is acceptable. They openly use the motif from the cold war era that ‘deviant’ sexuality is harmful to individuals and to society. The Family Research Council (FRC) states, “The Scouts' policy isn't a matter of intolerance – but security.” The FRC continues, “After hundreds of cases of child sex abuse plagued the organization, the BSA tried to create a membership criteria in the best interest of kids' safety and parents' rights” (FRC 2012b). The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization in the United States, states that the two main reasons “you don’t want homosexuals in the Boy Scouts” are that it would introduce “sexual confusion at a very impressionable age” and create “an environment where the likelihood of sexual abuse increases.” The commission concludes, “Our children are not sexual playthings and deserve the full protection of society … put the protection of kids first!” (DefendChristians.org 2013). Conservative Christian groups are not the only voices in support of the BSA ban against homosexual members and leaders. On Debate.org, an open website where users can share their opinions on a variety of issues, the question “Should the Boy Scouts of   47 America allow gay members?” cleaves respondents in half with 50% saying yes and 50% saying no. ‘No’ respondent GWL-CPA identifies as a 63-year-old male liberal atheist. His explanation for his ‘no’ vote is remarkably similar to the comments of the FRC and Christian Anti-Defamation Commission. “[Homosexuals] are not normal … They like being around young men for sexual pleasure and the hope that they can convince young boys to become homosexuals like them.” People who believe that ‘deviant’ sexuality exposes children to physical, moral, and developmental harm seem to conceptualize homosexuality as an external force threating children. The ‘normality’ of vulnerable, innocent children enforces the ‘abnormality’ and externality of homosexuality. Indeed the mere lack of protection translates to the active corruption of youth in the United States (Egan and Hawkes 2010:35). When sexuality transgresses into a child’s life, it is not only matter out of place, it also represents an inability or unwillingness to shield children from harm. On the Debate.org page over whether homosexuals should be allowed into the Boy Scouts of America, ‘no’ respondent teddy2013 argues that letting a gay man become a Scout leader would allow “at least the potential for attraction and abuse.” The respondent continues, “No parent wants to send there [sic] child into that situation.” Protecting children means keeping them safe from exposure to ‘deviant’ sexualities. Homosexuality in Children: A Point of Cultural Conflict I have discussed two major cultural discourses in chapters one and two: the idea that children lack sexual feelings and behaviors and the idea that homosexuality is a socially dangerous deviance from ‘normal’ sexuality. Both ideas have long, strong histories and guide many present-day Americans in their views about the intersection of   48 homosexuality and childhood. These discourses inform the conception of child homosexuality as unnatural and harmful because it violates both ‘normal’ childhood and ‘normal’ sexuality. Gay and lesbian children do not exist in this paradigm. Homosexual children are only produced through abuse and corruption of their innocence: in other words, environmental factors from which the children could have been protected. In chapter three, I will introduce a conflicting conception of the relationship between homosexuality and childhood from what can be termed the gay rights movement, which gained nationwide attention in the mid-1970s. This movement discusses sexuality as a collection of different but equal preferences. Heterosexuality is neither better nor worse than homosexuality; they are simply different. The movement argues that sexual preference is not a just cause for discrimination or stigma. Children are included in this notion of natural sexual preferences, or “orientations;” children are viewed as able to know their own sexual orientation early in life. There is a fundamental conflict between this acceptance of homosexual children and the older ideas that make homosexual children both victims and potential predators. In chapter three I will discuss some of the ways in which the gay rights movement has defined itself against previously dominant ideas of homosexuality and childhood. In chapter four, I will bring both sides of the conflict together by comparing their visions of a future in which homosexuality is acceptable. The ideas of chapters one and two form both the status quo from which change is defined and a dominant view that many Americans still subscribe to, often fiercely defended as the gay rights movement becomes increasingly mainstream. At this historical moment, the United States is experiencing a   49 major renegotiation of cultural meanings and boundaries as some try to create a new space for children who identify as gay or lesbian.   50 Chapter 3: Redefining Protection Our laws and social policies should protect children, not cater to the whims and sexual desires of sexual predators. We must oppose homosexual activism “for the children’s sake.”   - Traditional Values Coalition, 2011 I urge you to support and co-sponsor this important and long-overdue protection for LGBT students. This Act will help to ensure that discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students has no place in our country's public schools.     - Form letter supporting the Student Non-Discrimination Act, American Civil Liberties Union, 2012 As the passages above demonstrate, child protection is a concern within the ‘deviance’ discourse of homosexuality and the gay rights discourse. In chapter two, I explored how children have been positioned as the ‘prey’ of perverted, sexually aggressive homosexual adults. In this chapter I will turn to the gay rights movement and explain how the figure of the victimized child has changed to the gay or lesbian child facing an intolerant and hateful world where homosexuality is not accepted. Child protection, and to an extent conceptions of childhood innocence, remain, but in modified forms. On the most basic level, the gay rights movement claims that sexual attraction and behavior as a fundamental part of a person’s internal identity, rather than an external sickness or corruption. The movement essentially argues that variation within the sexuality aspect of identity should not be discriminated against; homosexuality should be accepted as part of the natural and normal variation of sexual ‘orientation’ within the human species. In this chapter, I will explore how this new discourse challenges and incorporates parts of the older discourses in chapters one and two.   51 Historical Origins of the Sexually ‘Orientated’ Homosexual Like other cultural ideas, the discourse of sexual ‘orientation’ grew out of a historical moment. The gay rights movement ignited in the cultural climate following civil rights fights for racial equality and women’s rights in the United States. “The drama and success of the black civil rights movement,” writes historian Fred Fejes, “created a new and powerful national narrative about minority group identity, oppression, and struggle in the United States” (2008:4-5). Variation in sexual preference was compared to variation in skin color, ethnicity, and sex. The first major national activism condemning discrimination against homosexuals happened in 1977 and 1978 when the United States was “consciously holding itself to the world as a model of freedom and democracy” and other ‘victimized’ groups based on race, religion, sex, and national origin were gaining legal protections and social attention (Fejes 2008:5). Fejes argues that the major obstacle for the gay rights movement was to disrupt homosexuality’s “meanings in the public mind,” its association with perversion and contagion. Only then could homosexuals be considered legitimate victims of discrimination instead of morally weak, sexually aggressive predators (2008:6). The gay rights movement created new ways to discuss homosexuality, drawn from the ideas of other civil rights movements. Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff’s Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America (1994) bases the strength of its arguments on connecting gay rights to other civil rights movements as common issues of individual liberty. The preface itself is entitled “Thank you, Rosa Parks,” referring to a prominent Africa-American civil rights activist.   52 Nava and Dawidoff assert that discrimination against homosexuals is the same as discrimination against African Americans. [I]ntermarriage between whites and blacks was once criminalized in this country. Criminalizing such behavior served the recognized social purpose of racial hegemony, but it did not transform that behavior itself into something criminal, let alone unnatural. In a similar fashion, criminalization of rape and violence directed by whites against blacks did not remove the criminal quality from such acts. The criminalization of the subject race in a racially defined society is an example of the kind of criminalization that homosexuals experience … That social policy serves no function in our society other than the preservation of a heterosexual privilege that does not appear to have had a beneficial effect on the social or moral common life (Nava and Dawidoff 1994:17). The problem of discrimination is that it violates the right of the individual to live fully and freely in society, a right supposedly protected by the United States government. Civil rights movements do differ according to the category of person whose rights are being vindicated [but] the ground of the claim remains essentially the same. The traditional American doctrine that governments are instituted for the purpose of protecting the fundamental rights of individuals, and the historical process by which these have been extended to groups who were enslaved, oppressed, and otherwise unacknowledged at the time of the founding, are the twin pillars of the gay rights movement – as they have been of every struggle to extend the promise of individual liberty to Americans (Nava and Dawidoff 1994:8). This argument is not about sexual practices or particular lifestyles. It hinges on whether gay and lesbian Americans are entitled to the same enjoyment as their fellow citizens of the freedom to make choices about how to live their lives without suffering discrimination in consequence (Nava and Dawidoff 1994:15). Similarly, in 2008, popular American actor George Clooney spoke out against Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage, by comparing the gay rights movement to the African American civil rights movement. Clooney said, “At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won't be an issue. Everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black” (Access Hollywood 2008).   53 At first, there was little controversy over the inclusion of minority sexualities as groups in need of legal protection. Between 1972 and 1976, twenty-nine cities and counties established some kind of legal protection against discrimination for gays and lesbians (Fejes 2008:53). But backlash quickly formed specifically drawing on fears of homosexuality and its supposed threat to children. As I mentioned in chapter one, the touchstone case happened in Dale County, Florida in 1977. A soon-national group called Save Our Children forced a public referendum to repeal an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual preference (Fejes 2008:3). The ordinance was condemned as “a violation of God’s law and as legal sanction of perversion and deviancy” (Fejes 2008:2). While Save Our Children proclaimed that homosexuals were illegitimate victims, gay rights activists felt the issue was ‘simple’: the law should afford equal rights and protection to gay and lesbian Americans who had long been socially stigmatized and harassed for a part of their identity (Fejes 2008:3, 6). Yet even within gay rights activism, there was conflict over what variation in sexuality should be called. In the early 1970s, two terms were typically used interchangeably in legislation: “sexual preference” and “sexual orientation” (Fejes 2008: 54). The connotations of each, however, became important as the gay rights movement faced increasing resistance and was forced to clarify its argument. While some activists argued for using the term ‘sexual preference’ because it “presented sexual activity in a more affirmative, voluntary manner,” ‘sexual orientation’ won out within the movement (Fejes 2008:54). ‘Orientation’ implied that homosexuality was not a choice, but a fundamental aspect of the self, more in line with skin color or sex and therefore more akin to other civil rights movements. While the previously quoted Nava and Dawidoff   54 describe individual liberty as the ability to make personal choices about how to live without discrimination, other activists stress that homosexuality in and of itself is not a choice. In a CNN op-ed piece, the first openly gay U.S. ambassador James C. Hormel argued that discrimination persists primarily because people believe homosexuality is a choice (2011). For them, it is as if we silly LGBT people would be perfectly happy and healthy if we would just make a different set of decisions about our lives … I spent the first 35 years of my life trying very hard not to be gay, to the extent that I married my college sweetheart and created a beautiful family of five children with her. Hard as I tried to make that life work, I could not escape my attraction to men. Choice had nothing to do with it (Hormel 2011). The word ‘orientation’ is defined as “a person’s basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings” (Oxford English Dictionary 2004). Pre-dating its association with sexualities, ‘orientation’ referred to the religious and societal positionings that guide individuals’ behavior and thoughts. In J.H. Barrows’ World’s Parliament of Religions (1893), the best education is that which “gives man … the best orientation; which most clearly defines his relations with society and with his Creator” (Oxford English Dictionary 2004). The framing of sexuality as an ‘orientation’ taps into the ‘American value’ of accepting diversity. In a Gallup poll in May 2012, 43% of Americans said that the “state of moral values” in the United States is poor. When respondents were asked to describe in their own words the most important problem, the most frequent answer (18%, with no close seconds) cited a lack of respect, tolerance, and compassion for others (Brown 2012). The sexual ‘orientation’ discourse naturalizes homosexuality as an acceptable part of a person’s core identity rather than a disease or corruption. Sexual ‘orientation’ is defined by the American Psychological Association today as “an enduring pattern of   55 emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes” (2008). Because of this new discourse, tolerating homosexuals has become culturally permissible, even encouraged as a display of the diverse ‘melting pot’ image of the United States. Over the last ten years, homosexual behavior in the United States has tilted from “morally wrong” to “morally acceptable” and pressure is increasing on those who disagree (Saad 2012). Negotiating Sexuality in Children The implication of this linguistic and cultural shift is that adults and children have a sexuality built into them, be it heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or something else. Knowledge of one’s sexual ‘orientation’ is often claimed to have pre-dated puberty. If sexual orientation is something that can be known or felt in childhood, it means that children are not innocent of sexual interest. This challenges the deep cultural idea of children as asexual, as discussed in chapter one. “I remember I was 9 years old,” said Ant, a forty-year-old comedian and reality show host in an entire documentary about when homosexual-identified people “knew” they were gay. “[My friend] Richard Scalfani swiped one of his dad’s Playboys. And he brings it into the fort. And I’m there (with two other friends). They open up the centerfold and they see [a model’s] breasts and say ‘Look at that’ and then they come down to her nether regions and say ‘Look at that.’ And I yell ‘Look at her shoes!’ … And in my head I said, ‘I’m not like them’” (Deggans 2008). This recollection suggests that both heterosexuality and homosexuality can be evident and known in childhood. A concept like homosexual people discovering their sexuality, especially early in life, implies that sexual orientation is something central and intrinsic, even unalterable, within a person’s   56 composition (Deggans). In contrast to the cultural ideas about homosexuality that functioned for the majority of United States’ history, homosexuality as a sexual orientation is an internal factor in a child’s life, not an external influence that can be deflected by parents and other adults. However, it is important to note that when early childhood experiences are recalled to provide evidence for lifelong sexual orientations, the experiences are often not overtly sexual. Instead of emphasizing explicitly sexual behavior or feelings, secondary associations with homosexuality are usually provided. Born this Way: Real Stories of Growing Up Gay is a blog with a collection of stories from homosexuals about their early childhood, sometimes from as early as one to three years old. The blog was the basis of Paul Vitagliano’s book of the same name and has had over 4,200,000 visitors since January 9, 2011 (2012). The posted stories of childhood experiences are meant to provide evidence that individuals have been gay or lesbian their whole lives, that they were “born this way.” Common stories include gay boys liking music or make-up and being bad at sports or fishing; lesbian girls hating ‘girly’ gifts or colors and having short hair; and both boys and girls enjoying cross-dressing in their youth. Few posts include references to feeling attracted to or sharing kisses with same-sex friends or acquaintances; even in those posts, those sexual experiences are embedded within a greater context of gender experimentation. The emphasis on poor or reversed gender performance (such as lesbian girls disliking ‘girly’ things and gay boys dressing like girls) fits cultural stereotypes of gays and lesbians acting like their opposite sexes, such as fashionable, emotionally sensitive men and commanding butch women (see Cartei and Reby 2012, Taylor 1983). More   57 importantly, non-sexual explanations of being “different” hedge cultural risk. They provide support for homosexuality’s ‘naturalness’ while simultaneously working within the cultural ideal of the asexual child. Asserting knowledge of sexual orientation in childhood makes homosexuality part of a predetermined identity, but speaking in terms of gender performance reduces pressure on the long enduring idea that children are innocent of full sexuality. Children can ‘know’ they are gay or lesbian, but this does not necessarily mean they are experiencing ‘abnormally early’ sexual development. The reason for omitting sexual experiences and feelings from childhood recollections of homosexuality could be self-censorship: individuals attempting to conform to the cultural division between children and sexuality, even as they are expressing knowledge of a sexual ‘orientation’ from youth. Omitting overt references to sexuality also strategically challenges the image of the homosexual as driven by sexual aggression; homosexuality can be known through other avenues besides sexual desire – by relatively benign clothing or hair preferences, for example. I believe both explanations are involved as the gay rights movement negotiates new space for homosexuality in childhood within and against other dominant cultural ideas. Interestingly, this new space has maintained the idea of children as vulnerable, even as it fundamentally rejects the conception of homosexuality as a contagious moral and physical threat. Instead of arguing that children need protection from the diseased homosexual world, the discourse of the gay rights movement argues that homosexual children need protection from the homophobic, heteronormative world. Protecting Gay and Lesbian Children   58 The gay rights movement has drawn from, even co-opted, the discourse of childhood vulnerability. Children are discussed as needing adult protection – not from homosexuals, but from homophobes; adults must affirm and defend children’s freedom and safety of sexual ‘orientation.’ In doing so, the movement both reverses a central discourse promoting intolerance of homosexuality and furthers the push to create institutional protections for homosexual people. While some campaigns focus on adult spheres, such as marriage rights and workplace discrimination, issues facing children are prominent in the gay rights movement today, such as bullying in school and youth groups and high rates of homelessness and suicide. By framing homosexuality as an issue of identity and discrimination, the threat to children changes. Homosexuality itself is no longer a threat; the threat comes from those who condemn homosexuality and could hurt children physically or emotionally through this condemnation. Again, the controversy over the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) ban against homosexual members and leaders is a useful example. Scouts for Equality, an organization which opposes the ban and calls for its repeal, describes their goal like this: “We’re asking Boy Scout councils, troops, and parents nationwide to stand up against the National Board in protest of their discriminatory policies.” Discrimination is used here to mean unfair treatment based on something a person cannot readily change, like race, age, or sex. Scouts for Equality states “we believe a blanket ban hurts youth by forcing gay scouts to keep silent about who they are, especially if they are being bullied.” Note how homosexuality is described as a fundamental element of identity – “who they are.” The reversal of medical opinion about homosexuality helps Scouts for Equality. Scouts for   59 Equality says that “for more than a decade, the American Medical Association has described this policy as potentially ‘psychologically traumatizing’ to young people.” Rising pressure pushed the BSA to issue a survey in spring 2013, asking 1.1 million scouts and their families about their thoughts on the BSA exclusion of homosexuals. The survey results and the ban will be reconsidered once again in May 2013 (Johnson 2013). The BSA is conceding to serious reconsideration partially because prominent BSA corporate sponsors have been withdrawing their financial support, using the same language of discrimination that Scouts for Equality uses. In November 2012, the United Parcel Service (UPS) withdrew its corporate sponsorship of the Boy Scouts of America. UPS stated that its foundation “seeks to support organizations that are in alignment with our … non-discrimination policy” (LGBTQ Nation Staff Reports 2012). UPS noted that it enforces equal treatment of the categories of people protected by law, as well as additional groups in its own policies. These categories “include, but are not limited to race, gender, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran or military status, pregnancy, age and religion” (LGBTQ Nation Staff Reports 2012). Intel, United Way, and Merck have justified their retractions of financial support on similar grounds (Ford 2012, Davis 2012, Merck 2012). Invoking the language of discrimination means that homosexuality is seen as an inherent part of a person’s identity, an ‘orientation’ beyond choice or change. This stance dramatically reverses the cards of morality. Those who discriminate are now the threatening force, not homosexuals. These former corporate sponsors of the BSA liken intolerance of sexual orientation to racial intolerance.   60 The push to remove the BSA ban is located within a larger context of child protection efforts. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supports the Student Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would “establish a comprehensive federal prohibition against discrimination and harassment in every public elementary and secondary school across the country based on a student’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.” According to ACLU, the bill currently has the support of over one-third of the Senate and 150 members of the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress. It is now in committee (GovTrack.us 2012). School environments are a major focus for those who call for the protection of homosexual children. Harassment and bullying are associated with high statistics of suicide, especially for non-heterosexually identified or assumed youth. The National Youth Association (NYA) says, “children and youth who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), or are perceived to be so, can face unrelenting teasing and bullying by their peers” (2010). The NYA lists the following statistics: • • • • 9 out of 10 LGBT students have experienced harassment at school. LGBT teens are bullied 2 to 3 times as much as straight teens. More than 1/3 of LGBT kids have attempted suicide. LGBT kids are 4 times as likely to attempt suicide then our straight peers. (2010) The number one way to support gay rights, says journalist and speaker on LGBT issues Ramon Johnson, is to “speak out against bullying.” Like school and youth group environments, the home is a major area of concern for the gay rights movement because children are conceptualized as extremely vulnerable to rejection. Beyond potentially being kicked out of their homes, the NYA says, “LGBT youth with ‘highly rejecting’ families are 8 times more likely to attempt suicide than those whose families accept them” (2010). Parents and families are viewed as the best   61 line of defense children have against a still largely intolerant world. They are encouraged to accept and affirm the sexual orientations of children whatever they may be. PFLAG NYC (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays of New York City) is involved in community outreach, support, and advocacy “through a partnership of parents, allies, and LGBT people” (PFLAG NYC 2013a). A PFLAG webpage entitled “Questions Parents Ask About LGBT People” advises parents about what to do and think about if their child is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. The reoccurring themes are that homosexuality is an unchangeable “inherent trait,” gay and lesbian children need and search for support from their families, and parental support means first and foremost accepting homosexuality in their child, then working to reduce the stigma against homosexuality in greater society (PFLAG NYC 2013b). Remember that you love your child, and to preserve — perhaps even strengthen — your relationship with him/her, you must try to move towards understanding and, eventually, acceptance … You didn't do anything wrong. The idea that parents are responsible for making their children gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered is a myth. Sexual orientation is an inherent trait, like eye and hair color … [T]here's nothing wrong about your child's sexual orientation. It's just the way some of us are made … The fact that your child told you shows his/her love for you and desire to have an honest relationship with you. It may also be a sign of a need for support. According to one study, up to 80% of gay youth report feeling severe social and emotional isolation … [U]ntil homophobia no longer exists in our society, your child may encounter some significant obstacles. It is even more unfortunate when this discrimination exists within a child's own family. One way you can support your child is to … help reduce some of the homophobia that exists in our society. After all, it is silence that allows prejudice and discrimination to survive (PFLAG NYC 2013b). While the protection of children is justified and expressed by the gay rights movement differently than by those who discuss homosexuality as a harmful ‘deviance,’ maintaining the cultural idea that children need adult protection and support can mitigate   62 anxiety about the shifting relationship between (homo)sexuality and children. Adults remain involved in the expression and meanings of children’s sexuality. Likewise, while the sexual ‘orientation’ of homosexuality may be acceptable in childhood, children are not granted sexual autonomy. Sexual activity in childhood is still open to parental surveillance and restriction. Affirmation of sexual orientation has not been taken to mean that children are now free to pursue relationships without parental consent or oversight. For example, on About.com there is an anonymous story from a mother who discovers her seventeen year old son Ben “locked in [an] embrace” with another boy. The theme throughout the story is not shock at Ben’s sexual orientation, but rather the mother’s intense and sudden need to figure out the extent of the boys’ relationship and talk to Ben about safe sexual practices. His sexual orientation merely seems to reinforce her parental protectionist anxiety. “I felt strongly that he needed to have a ‘safe sex’ talk from me more than almost anything else,” the mother narrates. Ben strongly protested ‘the talk,’ but his mom persisted, saying, “I need to tell you this stuff because I love you and don't want anything to happen to you.” She explains, “I apologized for bringing it up, but I also told him that if he was gay, that there were things that I had a responsibility to address, his safety being my number one priority.” Within this story, Ben’s sexual orientation is not threatening to his mother. Instead, signs that Ben is engaging in sexual activity prompt his mother’s concerns about risk and her “responsibility” to protect Ben. It is important to note that protecting the health of sexually active gay and lesbian children is made particularly complicated by continuing stigmas against homosexuality and against sexuality in childhood. For example, the human papillomavirus (HPV) is a   63 sexually transmitted virus linked to both cervical and anal cancers (Epstein 2010:64). The HPV vaccine Gardasil is widely marketed as a positive health decision for girls and young women, but there is little research into the potential ability of Gardasil to prevent anal cancer in boys and men who have sex with other males (Epstein 2010:72). The promotion of the vaccine for boys centers on its ability to reduce the risk of HPV for girls, a secondary benefit that not only obscures the potential direct health benefits for gay males but also tactfully assumes that boys will have sex with girls (Epstein 2010:745). One researcher in the United Kingdom commented on the impermissibility of sexuality, particularly homosexuality, in childhood: “It is bad enough suggesting to people that their 12-year-old daughter might need a vaccine against a sexually transmitted infection … I would be interested to see the response of suggesting to parents that they should vaccinate their boys at 12 in case they become gay” (Epstein 2010:81). The problem is that if Gardasil does prove to be effective protection against anal cancer, gay youth would gain the most from vaccination (Epstein 2010:81). Waiting until a male is secure in his sexuality or independent from family increases the risk that he will be infected with HPV through sexual contact before receiving the vaccine (Epstein 2010:76). Battle of the Discourses As the introductory quotes to this chapter suggest, a fundamental division exists in the United States today. While many hold fast to the meanings associated with homosexuality in the cold war era, those of a contagious perversion, the gay rights movement has established a different conception that shifts the threat of harm to those who discriminate against gays and lesbians, especially children. As we have explored,   64 this shift is radical, but it also works within and against the earlier conceptions of homosexuality and sexuality in children. The ‘sides’ of this battle of discourses, if it can be so termed, are equally supported in the United States. The concept of sexual ‘orientation’ and the associations that accompany it seem to be receiving more and more acceptance, but large populations in the United States resist, protesting that the gay rights movement is contorting the morals of the nation, encouraging changes that they do not support. In chapter four, I will delve into how supporters of both discourses view themselves today. This discussion will return to my introductory analysis of the conflict over homosexuality and children: a debate over who should be including as an insider in the United States. As the gay rights movement has grown in strength, the issue of whether to accept homosexuality has become a national issue. While in the cold war era ‘deviant’ sexuality was a threat to the country’s borders and strength against communist attack, today attention focuses on whose voices should be heard and whose vision should become America’s future. The forward emphasis brings incredible urgency to this present-day conflict over children and homosexuality because children themselves are often used as symbols of the future in the United States.   65 Chapter 4: Imagining the Future Conflict reigns over the ‘true’ relationship between homosexuality and children in the United States. Are gay people threatening the innocence and safety of children? Should gay kids be protected from homophobes? Vitriol is easy to find in comment threads on articles regarding the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) ban and other gay rights issues. The clinching arguments in both discourses of homosexuality as an ‘orientation’ and homosexuality as a disease reference deeply contrasting visions of the future if homosexuality was accepted as a sexual orientation rather than a harmful sexual deviance. In the United States, concerns about children are often felt to be synonymous with concerns about the future. I will unpack that connection in this chapter and address how it raises the cultural stakes of the intersection of homosexuality and children. ‘Our Children are Our Future’ On the surface, the connection between children and the concept of ‘the future’ may seem obvious. Children are young humans who, given adequate food, shelter, and healthcare, usually grow into adulthood. According to the World Bank, Americans have an average life expectancy of 78.2 years. That means that if we as a culture divide childhood and adulthood into separate periods of life, we can anticipate that most children to have a good six decades of “future” ahead of them. But that is not all that the phrase “our children are our future” implies in American culture. More than this obvious connection, children and their futures are a medium through which society expresses its ambivalence about present social and cultural conflicts. For example, in an op-ed article supporting the federal budget   66 sequestration that began on March 1, 2013, Forbes contributor Lawrence Kotlikoff adamantly writes that poor economic policies are “fiscal child abuse.” Like all budget “fights” over the last forty years in which contemporaneous “adult” generations come up with excuses for far more spending and far less taxes than our children can afford, this battle, regardless of its outcome, will leave the American dream where it found it – down the tubes (Kotlikoff 2013). Kotlikoff makes his case for sequestration by drawing on existing cultural links between an idea of the future welfare of America’s collective children (‘our children’) and society’s ability to maintain its identity (‘our future’), in this case the American Dream specifically – and the duty of true adults to protect the latter by protecting the former. When social or cultural conflict occurs, mixed responses often arise. Cultural meanings may be shifting and perhaps getting redefined. Even in populations advocating for change, this process of cultural adjustment can be tumultuous. I think it is because of the confusion during this uprooting that the future becomes a space to make worries and hopes legible. It is in the future when a social or cultural change may become normalized, so ‘the future’ becomes something meaningful to argue over during a time marked by conflicting views of change. Instead of an abstract notion of the future as any time that has not yet come to pass, the most resonance exists in imagining our children’s futures, the fates of those ‘innocent’ loved ones who exist now or are soon to be born into this world that we will ‘give’ them. The child is seen as a “site of almost limitless potential”; children can symbolically represent both their own and society’s future, both of which adults are supposed to mold (Bruhm and Hurley 2004:xiii).   67 The history of this connection between children and the future is not well documented; the association itself is simply assumed in most popular media and scholarship. The connection may have been formed in the Industrial Revolution when children were conceptually separated from adults, also a time in which theories of progress reigned and standard of living improved generation to generation. Change for the Children Today, the future of ‘our children’ is a concept that is widely used in discussions of social and political issues in the United States, including the environment, education, medicine, elections, and poverty. The idea that adults should enable children to achieve a healthy and successful future (‘the American Dream’) is used to galvanize support. In a 2010 brochure entitled, “Protect Children, Protect Our Future,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) argues that “governments, non-government organizations, private industry, educational institutions, and individuals” should support environmental policies, research, education, and healthcare in order to improve children’s lives now and as they grow up. The environmental issues listed in the EPA brochure impact the health of both children and adults – air pollution, lead, mercury, contaminated water, pesticides, radon, carbon monoxide, and unprotected sun exposure – but the issues are framed as especially victimizing children. For example: “Elevated levels of radon in indoor air may cause cancer … Radon can enter into basements or crawl spaces through cracks and porous foundations, leading to high levels in indoor air where children may sleep or play. In some locations, well water containing dissolved radon also may affect children’s health.” The brochure concludes, “Protecting children where they live, learn, and play is essential to ensuring that our environment is safe and healthy, now and for future   68 generations.” Concern about children is the link that connects the future with present actions. Though the EPA monitors general environmental risks, specifically speaking about children invokes a sense of collective responsibility in the United States. The brochure did not frame health hazards as individual or global risks, but rather as actions to be taken for ‘our children,’ innocently playing and sleeping without protection. Their harm today affects their future health and ability to continue keeping the United States strong tomorrow. On a broad level, thinking about the future of ‘our children,’ or ‘America’s children,’ is a way of imagining possible futures that could result from social actions. This is why children are frequently invoked in political campaigns. During Obama’s reelection campaign, advertisers Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein released a black and white video of children singing about how the United States will fall apart if Obama loses the election. The video is set in the future and the children are singing back to their parents (Morgenstern 2012). The lyrics include: Imagine an America Where strip mines are fun and free Where gays can be fixed And sick people just die And oil fills the sea … We’re the children of the future American through and through But something happened to our country And we’re kinda blaming you We haven’t killed all the polar bears But it’s not for lack of trying The Earth is cracked Big Bird is sacked And the atmosphere is frying … Mom and Dad We’re blaming you! (Morgenstern 2012)   69 As it is explicitly communicated in this video, children are the ones who will experience the effects of present actions or inactions. In the United States, it is an engrained idea that ‘our children’ should receive the best future possible. Social and cultural conflict leads to discussions of the future, how present day choices will impact society through their effects on children. This way of discussing cultural change is evident in the different views of homosexuality in the United States today. For the rest of this chapter, I will connect the ideas about homosexuality described in previous chapters to two very particular imaginings of the future. These imaginings or visions explain the urgent tone of gay rights debates. If Homosexuality is Acceptable… As I have explored in chapters two and three, there are two very different discourses about homosexuality and childhood in the United States today. While many Americans believe that homosexuality is an undesirable, even contagious perversion, others argue that homosexuality is merely one of many sexual ‘orientations,’ neither worse nor more threatening than heterosexuality. In this conflict over the cultural meaning of homosexuality, children are frequently invoked in arguments. We have seen several cultural reasons why already: children are sexually innocent and should not be around overt and/or deviant sexuality, homosexuality could harm children or convert them from normalcy (heterosexuality), and children should be protected from all threats, which can now include homophobia. There is one more layer to add. Social and cultural change inspires imaginings of a future in which such a change would be established. Children are the symbol through which these future imaginings draw energy and resonance. The contemporary debate over homosexuality is an   70 excellent example of this phenomenon; imaginings of the future litter debates and have sparked a sense of urgency about the changing meaning of homosexuality. Paralleling the two dominant views of homosexuality I have examined, there are two dominant visions about what the world would be like if homosexuality were to become an acceptable sexual ‘orientation.’ The visions are two starkly opposing poles, which I will refer to as an Immoral Hell and an affirming Utopia of Equality. I will take each imagining in turn and show how these visions arise repeatedly in contemporary debates over homosexuality. Children are used in both as symbolic rallying cries. Immoral Hell For Americans who believe homosexuality is a perverted deviance, accepting homosexuality as a sexual ‘orientation’ represents society taking a definitive step towards bringing Hell to earth. Religious and moral language is extremely common. In response to President Obama’s reelection and “his pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, anti-freedom agenda,” the Family Research Council describes Obama and his supporters as attempting to transform the country directly counter to “the heart of the church” (2012b). “The time is coming, perhaps sooner than we think, when all Christians will have to choose between being subservient to the state and its social engineering – or heeding the call to discipleship, at all costs.” When this moment of decision faces parents in the form of their child identifying as gay or lesbian, some disown their children rather than support the acceptance of homosexuality in society. In a letter to his son James that went viral in 2012, an anonymous father wrote, "You made your choice though wrong it may be. God did not   71 intend for this unnatural lifestyle. If you choose not to attend my funeral, my friends and family will understand" (Huffpost Gay Voices 2012). The future in this vision is profoundly affected by the trend of growing acceptance of homosexuality. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said that when the ‘traditional’ family is threatened by gay marriage, “the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is called into question” (The Telegraph 2012). “The question of the family ... is the question of what it means to be a man, and what it is necessary to do to be true men. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears.” Accepting homosexuality would mean losing God and straying from the path of humanity. In a letter to the editor, Gwen Simmons of Vero Beach, Florida, argued against including homosexuals in the Boy Scouts: “The Roman Empire fell because of its moral decline. Sodom and Gomorrah burned to the ground because of such vile behavior. That’s what’s going to bring America down, too. Open your eyes, people; don’t you see what’s going on? Stand up for what you know in your heart is right, and don’t let others pressure you into accepting their behavior. Only then will America have any hope” (Simmons 2013). Children are the avenue through which this Immoral Hell imagining of the future is communicated. For example, “the whole issue of gay marriage,” according to Susan Brinkmann of the Catholic Education Resource Center, “can be summed up in one word – children” (2004). She argues that children need both mothers and fathers to “form their sexual identity” and to receive both “‘sources of love and support.’” Brinkmann argues that gay marriage would create three different types of marriages: female-male, malemale, and female-female. “This new set of marital structures will, in turn, produce three new classes of children,” including two classes of children unable to achieve “‘full   72 human development.’” Meanwhile, accepting same-sex marriage would be a slippery slope towards society accepting polygamy and polyamory, described as a trend to which “most of us” would object. Brinkmann returns to children to close her article with the concept of children’s welfare; “the best interests of the child should be put first in these situations.” She frames gay marriage in terms of its impact on children and the problems it could bring: children unable to develop into full adults and the expansion of marriage rights to “‘every conceivable combination of male and female.’” In the Immoral Hell vision, the effects of accepting homosexuality include preventing children from developing properly and creating a world in which the very foundations of humanity, marriage, and the human relationship with God are eroded. Utopia of Equality On the other side of the symbolic battlefield are Americans who support the characterization of homosexuality as a sexual orientation and hope for a ‘better world’ in which all sexualities are affirmed equally. The present world is closer to Hell in this imagining of the future. Hope pervades that homosexuality will become acceptable; it is described as almost inevitable with only temporary obstacles and setbacks. The Trevor Project, for example, is a national organization that provides resources and a hotline for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) youth contemplating suicide. It was founded by the creators of an Academy Award-winning short film TREVOR, a film about a 13 year old gay boy who gets teased incessantly by his classmates, a homosexual kid facing a threatening world (2010b). While the Trevor Project’s tangible goals are rooted in crisis intervention and suicide prevention, it states that its overarching vision is “a future where the possibilities, opportunities and dreams   73 are the same for all youth, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity” (2010a). With this hope placed firmly on the future, the Trevor Project seems to see itself as a source of refuge in the presently threatening world, advocating for a future in which homosexual youth are not merely legible as victims of discrimination but valued as equal participants in United States society. Hard work is discussed as the only thing necessary to achieve this utopian future for homosexuals, in complete alignment with other civil rights struggles that improved the United States. In May 2012, the New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg commended Obama’s declaration of support for same-sex marriage. This is a major turning point in the history of American civil rights. No American president has ever supported a major expansion of civil rights that has not ultimately been adopted by the American people - and I have no doubt that this will be no exception. The march of freedom that has sustained our country since the Revolution of 1776 continues, and no matter what setbacks may occur in a given state, freedom will triumph over fear and equality will prevail over exclusion. Today's announcement … builds on the courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans (Stein 2012). The It Gets Better campaign is an interesting formulation of this deeply positive vision of the future. Created by syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller after a 15 year old named Billy Lucas committed suicide in 2010, It Gets Better is a worldwide project of over 50,000 videos from people giving homosexual and other bullied youth the message that if they can survive childhood and young adulthood, they will reach a time when they will have a louder voice and be treated better. The message is not just that adults have it better than children. The idea is that the world is changing towards a brighter future. A timeline records events around the globe showing “how it’s gotten better,” including commercials featuring gay and lesbian characters, and awards, laws, speeches, and centers pushing for equality. The It Gets Better Project   74 mission statement is to communicate to youth that life will get better and keep pushing for the changes needed to make the world a better place for homosexual and other bullied youth (It Gets Better Project 2013). This vision of the future in which homosexual youth can grow up in a more tolerant and embracing world is filled with hope and idealism about how ‘our children’ of all sexual orientations will live better lives than we do today. It will get better. The momentum is forward, pushing through the obstacles of the present world of homophobia and harassment. Roles for Vision Supporters Imaginings of the future, often expressed as concern about children and their futures, create roles for their standard bearers to play. Imaginings create actions for their believers to do. This is an important point because trends of current behaviors make more sense if viewed through the cultural positioning of the actors. Seemingly disparate and extreme actions are more understandable if the context of the actor’s vision of the world is clear. The Immoral Hell vision of a homosexuality-accepting world inspires primarily defensive actions. Actions for believers include praying to God for help since God does not support homosexuality in this vision, personal resistance to cultural change by disowning friends and family members who identify as homosexual, and keeping known homosexuals out of cultural institutions such as the military, marriage, and youth education and training facilities. The Utopia of Equality vision of a homosexuality-accepting world is more offensive rather than defensive. The focus is on networking across ‘artificial’ divisions   75 of age, skin color, and religion and combining forces rather than specifically fighting opponents of their vision. Actions for believers include gathering ‘allies’ who support non-discrimination towards homosexuals, publicizing the image of homosexuals as people just like non-homosexuals, and creating visible ‘safe spaces’ where people of all sexual orientations are treated equally. In my experience at Whitman College, authority figures such as professors and resident assistants are especially encouraged to post “Safe Zone” posters, promoting the conception of cultural change as embodied by the most educated and influential community leaders. The Present As I argued in my introduction, at this historical moment Americans are experiencing incredible change and anxiety about identity and the future in many areas of life. One of these areas is the shifting meaning of homosexuality. Children become involved at multiple symbolic levels, including in the actual visions or imaginings of the future. Concern about children and their futures is a way of expressing concern about present changes. Children are why some say gay marriage should not be legalized. Others say children are why people should post personal videos to the internet supporting homosexuals. Casting issues in terms of their impact on children draws on the idea that children will experience the choices adults make today. Visions of the future if homosexuality is accepted are extremely revealing. These visions connect two areas of knowledge: a group’s central concerns and the group’s actions. Furthermore, imaginings of the future talk about the present. Within the vision lies the ‘truth’ from the people’s perspective. The Immoral Hell vision expresses outrage over an already corrupted world that is getting progressively worse. Believers cast   76 themselves as the last brave stand towards destruction of humanity. The Utopia of Equality vision, by contrast, is powerfully positive and hopeful, focused on connecting pockets of equality that already exist. Although the visions themselves are polar opposites, they align towards the same vision of the present world: one that is increasingly accepting homosexuality. This shared paradigm pits believers in the two dominant visions against one another instead of searching for areas of common ground. Children are caught in the middle; protected from homosexuals and protected from homophobes, given a way to identify sexually in childhood and assumed to be abuse victims for doing so.   77 Conclusion “There is no way of insulating children from the “cultural politics” of everyday life,” wrote Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent (1998:2). In the United States, making a cultural space for gay and lesbian children, even simply a space for the full acceptance of homosexuality, requires redefining child sexuality and child protection. While trends indicate that the United States is transitioning into accepting homosexuality as one of many sexual ‘orientations’ rather than as a harmful ‘deviance,’ it is important to recognize the depths of this shift and where and why change is met with resistance. This thesis is an effort to understand why so much conflict exists over homosexuality in the United States today. It is an attempt to answer “Why can’t the United States just accept gay and lesbian adults and children?” Again and again, symbols surrounding children explain why homosexuality, and homophobia, can be so threatening. In sum, two main views on homosexuality are dominant today. Both draw in different ways on the vision of the child as innocent and vulnerable. The first draws directly from ideas established in the cold war era: homosexuality is harmful to the fabric of society, as a deviance and contagion, and children need to be especially protected from homosexual predators lest children be converted to homosexuality as well. In this first view, accepting homosexuality, especially in and around children, is profoundly wrong. It means promoting abnormal behavior that causes physical and moral degradation. The second view of homosexuality that is dominant in the United States today is that homosexuality is one of several lifelong sexual ‘orientations.’ As such, homosexuals (including children) should be protected by law and by practice from discrimination. The   78 origin of this view is in the gay rights movement, which followed earlier civil rights movements by calling for equal treatment of historically minority or marginalized groups, such as women and African Americans. The discourse that emerged in this ‘orientation’ view of homosexuality modifies the notion that children need protection by changing the perpetrator of harm to the homophobe rather than the homosexual. Children, like adults, have a sexuality built into them that should be respected and protected. These two main views of homosexuality fundamentally conflict in many ways. They form a push and pull relationship in which cultural change is absorbed, challenged, and constrained. While longstanding ideas about homosexuality are changing, concern for children has remained constant. The gay rights movement is attempting to make a space in which homosexual youth are legible and protected from harm and discrimination. Meanwhile, others hold that protecting children from homosexuality is a necessity and can prevent the spread of the behavior in the first place. Reflections on Motivation and Presentation My personal and scholarly interest in homosexuality is two-fold. First, I believe this is the civil rights issue of my generation. My placement in history begs me to examine the cultural conflict and change in action. Second, I strongly support gay/LGBTQ rights – a positioning I have actually attempted to keep out of the body of this thesis. I will share a few details of my personal experience to explain the presentation of this thesis. I hope this will be both honest reflection into my biases and an explanation of why I chose to do what I did. Twice so far, important people in my life have told me they identified as lesbian or gay and waited for me to reject them. Until these conversations occurred, I never   79 particularly thought about gay rights or homosexuality at all. It initially felt like an insult that these loved ones considered the possibility that I would condemn them for their sexuality; I did not feel that our friendship was in any way contingent on who they were or were not attracted to. Soon I found the world far less simple than I had imagined; many people across the United States are deeply uncomfortable with homosexuality and other not-100% heterosexual sexualities. As people I am close to face stigma, it is hard not to react with anger. It is hard to take a step back and try to understand why people think, act, and speak in ways they do. The process of writing this thesis has not changed my fundamental agreement with the gay rights movement, but it has made me more understanding of the logics and concerns lying beyond opposing viewpoints. While real child and adult lives are certainly deeply affected by the current clash of symbols, I chose not to advocate for or against any belief in this thesis. This mirrored my journey to understand rather than to validate or invalidate beliefs about homosexuality. I also avoided the language of “progress,” which would imply that people who are uncomfortable with homosexuality are outdated artifacts. While ideas on both sides are informed by older cultural thoughts, these ideas hold because they reflect present day concerns. The Power of Children Continues Children arise again and again in current debates about homosexuality. I will conclude my thesis with a final example: one that illustrates the ongoing power of a focus on children despite claims of “progress” by gay rights activists.   80 The United States Supreme Court is currently considering the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage and the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as it pertains to the denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples (Liptak 2013). Though marriage is an issue that primarily involves adults, the consequences of same-sex marriage for children have been raised repeatedly. In the oral arguments on March 26, 2013, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked Charles J. Cooper, a lawyer representing opponents of same-sex marriage, to define the harm that would result from the inclusion of same-sex couples in the institution of marriage. Cooper responded that “redefining marriage will have real-world consequences” as yet unknown since the “experiment” of legally married same-sex couple is relatively new (United States Supreme Court 2013:19). Justice Antonin Scalia then brought up the possible harm of same-sex couples adopting children. He said, “Mr. Cooper, let me – let me give you one – one concrete thing … [T]here's considerable disagreement among – among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a – in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not” (United States Supreme Court 2013:19). Soon after, Justice Kennedy conceded that legally married same-sex couples are new: “We have five years of information to weigh against 2,000 years of history or more.” But he reversed the argument about children’s welfare, claiming that “there is an immediate legal injury or legal – what could be a legal injury, and that's the voice of these children. There are some 40,000 children in California, according to the Red Brief, that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and   81 full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?” (United States Supreme Court 2013:21). Cooper responded, “There is simply no data at all that would permit one to draw – draw that conclusion” (United States Supreme Court 2013:22). The protection of children is a constant theme in both discourses of homosexuality as a perverted deviance and homosexuality as a civil rights issue. 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