The gay rights movement starting in the late 1960s has reconstructed the way we view sexual identities. Historically, we viewed homosexuals as people with a disability that could be fixed through religious ceremonies, or in extreme cases, lobotomies. The term “homosexuals” was even coined after the word heterosexual, as a way to marginalize a group of people based on their behavior and sexual preferences. The gay identity movement that started in the 1970s focused on affirming gay identity and emphasized the importance of diversity (Armstrong, 21). Since this very influential movement, the way we view sexual identities in contemporary America has completely changed, especially with the legalization of gay marriage during the Obama Administration. Americans have become more accepting of sexual identities that stray away from the norm and thus, this country has experienced a shift in very constraining identities like being simply straight, gay or lesbian, to being more accepting of people that identify as queer, transgender, asexual and the many other sexualities that exist today. The idea of assimilation and post-gay politics is seen as homosexuals succumbing to heteronormative life, but now more than ever we have a society that is very open to the creation of new sexual identities and is very laissez-faire. In America today, people identify on a spectrum rather than a binary, leading to a more fluid definition of sexuality that will ultimately result in a society that doesn’t need labels or categories to define people.
Traditionally, sexual identities have been seen as constraining, where people have to fit into a rigid definition of being gay, lesbian or straight. People do not necessarily have one permanent object of choice, therefore it does not make sense to be defined by a singular object. Society is moving away from constraining identities and there is a sense of openness and acceptance to an array of sexual identities. Prominent transgender figures like Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox have put a new face to the transgender movement and have made people more accepting of people who identify as something outside of the gender binary. The director of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Nick Adams said that “more than 80 percent of people in the U.S. have never met a transgender person” (Scott, Caitlyn Jenner’s Growth into Transgender Advocate Role). With Caitlyn Jenner’s platform, Americans followed her along her journey to understand what it means to be a transgender, instilling a new sense of acceptance and understanding toward transgender individuals.
Norms regarding the inflexibility of sexual identities have changed substantially in the past ten years. Lisa Diamond, an American psychologist and feminist, studied sexual fluidity in women’s identities, and explored how being lesbian or straight is no longer seen as a constraining identity. One of her subjects, 27-year-old Carol, described her nonexclusive attractions to both men and women, saying “I would say that the way that I define lesbian is probably the same, but I have become more flexible. I think I have become more comfortable in looking at it as a continuum instead of discrete categories” (Diamond, 69).
This idea of sexual flexibility is also present in men. The term heteroflexibility defines a person that has a generally heterosexual lifestyle but sometimes participates in behaviors or relationships with someone of the same sex. Heteroflexibility allows for a less rigid and constraining definition of heterosexuality. At the beginning of the 21st century, an abundance of new terms like bi-curious, mostly straight and heteroflexible signified a change in how younger Americans view sexuality. “These new terms and labels of sexual identity seemed to represent a renewed sense of sexual identity among straight people who have same-sex desires, and possibly also their search for public recognition and social acceptance of their non-normative heterosexual lifestyles” (Carrillo, Hoffman, 93).
America’s acceptance for new sexualities is seen through the debate of what to call all of these new identities. Some people believe the answer is to add more letters to LGBT to include people who identify on a broader spectrum. “‘There’s a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality,” said Jack Halberstam, a transgender professor at the University of Southern California” (Schulman, 8). The emergence of sexual fluidity and flexibility has created an environment where sexual identities are less constraining and people are more accepting of a looser definition of sexuality.
Society is moving away from constraining identities and instead realizing that sexuality is fluid, making the rigidness of the gender binary obsolete. It is human nature to categorize and label people, but this becomes detrimental when individuals can only be seen as one thing. Psychotherapist Joe Kort examined the differences between heteroflexible, homoflexible and bisexual and how these identities allow for a much more fluid idea of sexuality. “We are too attached to a system of sexual identity labels that are being shown to be increasingly outdated. Young people are embracing terms like “genderqueer” and “pansexual” and creating a host of others because those labels describe how they view themselves better than the ‘old’ ones did” (Kort, 12).
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher who believed that power and knowledge normalize and discipline members of society. In the “History of Sexuality,” Foucault explores the history of repression during the Victorian era compared to the sexual revolution in the 1960s. This sexual liberation movement led to an incitement of discourse where society became obsessed with talking about sex. Foucault believed that the more we know about sex, the more we say we are sexually oppressed. “It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject… so that we must always start out once again in search of it. It is possible that where sex is concerned, the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own” (Foucault, 33). Foucault is complaining that we use the sense of repression to create discourses, and that society doesn’t recognize that the more we talk about sex, the more forms of sexual knowledge are created. This sexual knowledge in turn creates more norms for society to abide by, so we are essentially digging our own grave. Human’s natural tendency to label and categorize people is extremely restricting, and this is what Foucault and Kort are both describing. “I think that in the future, the complexity and fluidity of both genders’ sexual identifications will overcome the present binary way of thinking” (Kort, 12). So many feats have already been taken to reconstruct the binary system, and with each new sexual identity movement, society comes closer to eliminating labels altogether.
With Donald Trump being elected into power, he has placed a constraint on people who define themselves as something outside of the norm, which will put a hindrance on the social progress of a more flexible definition of sexuality. In the same vein, this will allow people to come together and form stronger collective identities that will ultimately lead to a society that doesn’t need labels to define one another. During the Obama Administration, the legalization of gay marriage allowed for increased acceptance and therefore assimilation of gay culture. Amin Ghaziani describes this as the “post-gay” era, and believes that “assimilation can mute identity as much as diversity can amplify it by highlighting distinctions” (Ghaziani, 100). Despite compelling evidence that gay culture is seen as normalized, the creation of more diverse and distinct labels in the past few years proves that sexual identities are not being muted, but rather society is more willing to let people define themselves as whatever they want. The Trump Administration has created a social atmosphere that once again has excluded the LGBTQ community. Through Trump’s attempt to ban transgenders from serving in the military and refusing to acknowledge gay pride month, the LGBTQ community has built a stronger collective identity and participate less in assimilation politics. This newfound collective identity has provoked people to see sexuality as a more fluid concept and therefore identify less with socially constructed labels.
In contemporary American life, especially following the legalization of gay marriage, a lot of Americans have become more accepting of sexual identities that stray away from the norm. Society has experienced a shift in constraining identities, and people now identify on a spectrum rather than a binary. This leads to a more fluid society that doesn’t need labels or categories to define people. By creating labels society is automatically marginalizing the other. The more labels created, the more discourse arises, which causes society to slip down a steeper slope in trying to define what normality is. As soon as the tendency to label people diminishes, society will be a more harmonious place where everyone can coexist.
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