Humor and the Emergence of the Gay Culture
During America's growth, homosexuality became a very taboo topic, one seldom mentioned and rarely discussed. Just as the Sexual and Racial Revolutions promoted acceptance of once discouraged social matters, the Homosexual Revolution has promoted the acceptance of the gay culture in today's society. Undoubtedly, humorous homosexual characters in television and in other forms of entertainment are helping to increase the acceptance of the gay culture by portraying the stereotype in a digestible way.
To fully understand an analysis of gay humor, or rather, why other people find the gay culture so funny, a secure understanding of the history of the gay culture is necessary. The term homosexuality was not introduced into the English language until the late 19th century when Charles Gilbert Chaddock created the word (Halperin 15). That is not to say that homosexuality was not present before that time. As a matter of fact, homosexual trends were more prevalent and widely accepted a thousand years ago than they were half a decade ago. References to homosexuality actually date back to early biblical times when, during a story in the book of Genesis, Lot was spending time in Sodom and the men of Sodom called to him saying, "Where are the strangers who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may know them!" In the passage, the word "know" is referring to what we now know as sodomy.
Before Chaddock coined homosexuality in 1898, homosexual activity was referred to as sexual inversion. George Chauncey stated that "Sexual inversion, the term used most commonly used in the nineteenth century, did not denote t ...