1990s Gay Culture

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Recommended: Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America

Within the 1990s there is a persistent problem of Gay culture. Early in the 1990s it was hard to come out and let the world know that you are gay. Within the early 1990s The Wedding Banquet (1993), although it approached the issue of Wei-Tung Gao trying to tell his parents that he is gay and still accepting as who he is. Contrastingly within the late 1990s it becomes more acceptable to society by having celebrities coming out like Ellen Degeneres during her tv show Ellen. The two kinds of media contrast as a form of whether or not to come out as a gay or not during a time when AIDs was prominent and new.
Within the early 1990s there is a rise in queer culture that many people did not know for what it was. At first, the United States thought it was problematic because it was an invasion on the home-front and the country is trying to figure out its own identity culturally, which led to the “culture” wars. The idea of culture wars was that historically U.S. had problems defining itself culturally through popular media such as music, television, and film. Music was a popular medium that the U.S. tried to define itself culturally, but the music video of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” where she is combining explicit sexual references with religious idols. In addition to this being gay was not accepted within the early 1990s and was problematic because it was not widely accepted by the general public. Within the early 1990s it is represented through queer culture which is similar to gay, but was different at the same time. Taken from an anthropological approach Michael Moffatt references from Kath Weston’s book about gay culture being entirely different from how we normally perceive it (Moffatt). In the state of “California gay and lesbian c...

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...y, but by being close to the present it is still complex to fully analyze a decade as more time continues to progress we will further understand the 1990s and the impact it has especially within the gay community and culture.

Works Cited

Green, Robert-Jay. ""Lesbians, Gay Men, and Their Parents": A Critique of LaSala and the Prevailing Clinical "Wisdom"" Family Process 39.2 (2000): 257-66. Print.

McCarthy, Anna. "Ellen: Making Queer Television History." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001): 593-620. Project Muse. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.

Mimura, Glen M. "What Is Asian American Cinema." Introduction. Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009. N. pag. Pdf.

Moffatt, Michael. "Ethnographic Writing About American Culture." Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 205-29. JSTOR. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.

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