Gender, Youth, & Moral Panic

Cynthia Comacchio, “Dancing to Perdition” (1997) Between WWI and WWII, concern with effects of modernization on youth, notably worry concerning leisure activities Connection between “citizenship,” “national welfare,” “modernity”

Worry that leisure activities and attraction of emergent mass culture would lead to “degeneration” Efforts to regulate what being an adolescent might mean, what passages it might go through, how it could be articulated An adult issue of control, regulation, censorship

Concerned to reproduce white, middle-class, Christian domestic ideal and normative ideas about appropriate articulations of gender and, connected to this, (heteronormative) sexuality

Anxieties concerning social and racial hygiene, but also about class hierarchies and separations Expressed in discourses around music and dancing as “immoral,” “indecent” Concern about crime and sexuality in movies because “impressionable youth” emulate what they see, males emulating criminal behaviours/sexuality, females emulating sexualities on screen

Mary Louise Adams, “Youth, corruptibility, and English-Canadian post-war campaigns against indecency” (1996) Mass market publications from the US Concern with printed matter depicting crime, “perversion,” etc. Notion that youth required literature to be regulated because it was cheap and accessible, and youth as in need of protection because impressionable, not yet formed moral beings

In particular, need to control sexual images to maintain normative sexuality, making the “immoral” seem normal “perverts might cease to be perverse; abnormality might fail to operate as a negative marker of sexual and moral difference from the norm; monogamous heterosexuality might end up as just one of many forms of sexual expression” (93)

Dates to Think About LGBT rights in Canada In British North America it was a capital crime to be gay Early 20c became an offense punishable by life in prison 1948 – criminal code labels gay men “dangerous sexual offenders” and “psychopaths” Decriminalization in 1969 – Trudeau: “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” Legalization of same-sex partnerships legalization of same-sex marriage

More Dates to Think About 1934, The Children’s Hour on Broadway “The Children's Hour, a stage play by Lillian Hellman, premieres on Broadway. The play is set at an all-girls boarding school run by two women. A student accuses the two women of having a lesbian affair, an accusation which destroys their lives. The play is a huge hit despite the fact that at the time it is illegal in New York to make any reference to homosexuality on stage.”

1962 “Advise and Consent, a film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is released in theaters. The film features a rookie senator with a homosexual past as one of its main characters. The senator is played by Don Murray.”

1967 “The Advocate begins publication in Los Angeles as a local newsletter by the activist group PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education).”

1969 Stonewall Riots

1972 “That Certain Summer, a made-for-TV movie, airs as the ABC Movie of the Week. It is the first TV movie to deal with the subject of homosexuality sympathetically. Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook, big name stars at the time, play lovers.”Martin Sheen and Hal Holbrook, big name stars at the time, play lovers.”

1975, first gay male couple as characters in series in Hot L Baltimore 1977 prime time TV series Soap has gay character played by Billy Crystal

1980s and the AIDS Crisis Early 1980s, AIDS crisis, Rock Hudson comes out, made-for-TV movie An Early Frost

1991 First Kiss between gay couple on L.A. Law

1992 Angels in America wins Pulitzer Prize

1993 Philadelphia with Tom Hanks

1994 Ikea ad with gay men shopping m/watch?v=G47ol0zYXg k m/watch?v=G47ol0zYXg k

1997 Ellen comes out on Oprah, later that same year her sit-com character also comes out (also to Oprah, who plays her psychologist)

1998 Will & Grace

2000 Gay character on All My Children (Gay marriage 2009) and US Queer as Folk Premieres

2001 Rachel kisses college friend Melissa (Winona Ryder) on Friends

2002 Rosie O’Donnell comes out

2003 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

2004 The L-Word

2006 Neil Patrick Harris comes out

2008 Ellen gets married in California (for reals)

2009 Glee and Modern Family premiere

Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives Directed by Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie Produced by National Film Board of Canada, Studio D 1993

The Celluloid Closet Book written by Vito Russo in 1981 (revised 1987) American documentary directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman in 199