A Tribute to my own Ignorance

I would like to compose a quick blog detailing my own ignorance.   I LOVE THE BOOK GAY NEW YORK.  Mostly because I know almost nothing about the history of Gay culture, and every single fact Chauncey puts in his book is of interest to me.  The "assumptions" that Chauncey highlights in the introduction of his book struck me, because while I hadn't ever believed in the myth of internalization as Chauncey describes it (I had thought that kids who revealed themselves to be gay first to a straight community may have internalized the idea that it was bad if their parents forced them to go to a hospital or something, as I have heard happening) but the myths of isolation and invisibility were both ideas that I had believed.  I had just assumed that gay culture has become more and more accepted over time, and that it has become more visible in culture today.  It did not occur to me that there have been ups and downs, if you will, in the acceptance of gay culture, and that the early 1900s were, in fact, more accepting than the 1950s.   I had also assumed that gay culture used to be practically invisible and that the public nature of homosexuality was a much more recent development.   Well, I was wrong, and this is just the first of my misconceptions that Chauncey brought to light.  
    Another concept that I found fascinating was one which we discussed extensively in class on Monday, and that is the concept of fairies, queers, normals, and gender.  It is sometimes painful to realize just how blinded I am to my own social conditioning.  I had always assumed that there were only four general categories: gay, straight, bisexual, and transgendered, and within those I kind of lumped gay bisexual and transgendered as "not straight."  Ouch.  This goes right along with a reading I had to do for my English class this week on feminism, in which they discuss the "patriarchal binary,"  in which everything is constructed in our language and thinking in terms of two extremes, with one being better than the other, and the better one being whatever the traditional male is.   Thus it is painful yet good to begin to recognize some of my own internalization of that very concept.  Fairies were in fact a particular type of Gay men who identified more with women and a sense of "femininity,"  and often sought out "normal" men with whom to have sex.  On the other hand, there was a division within this group of people and those who identified themselves as "queers,"  or men who wanted to have sex with other men while still preserving the traditional concept of the male gender.  These such men often felt unhappy with the notion that all gay people were fairies, as they didn't really identify with that group.  Finally, perhaps what is the most interesting is the tying together of all these ideas into the concept of gender.  In fact, what was perhaps the most interesting was that  in the early 20th century, we had not yet developed the idea of gender and sexuality being the same thing for "normal" people.  Rather, it was fine for a man to have sex with other men as long as he still behaved, "like a man."  This is almost more lenient than today, when people are seen by traditionalists as "abnormal,"  if they have sex or are attracted to people of the same sex, regardless of how they themselves behave or dress.  
   Overall, Gay New York is exactly the kind of non-fiction book that I wish I had more free time to read- the type of book that opens my eyes to some of my own misconceptions and ignorance and really shows me a legacy and a world that I didn't understand or know about before.   I can't wait to read the last section and see how things began to change in the mid-1900s.