'Homosexuals' were once regulated and defined by 'experts'; now these experts need no longer do it, for the homosexual has assumed that role for himself or herself.
from Kenneth Plummer's The Making of the Modern Homosexual, 1981.
Jeffrey Weeks writes about this move toward self-definition (/ identity policing from within) in Sexuality and Its Discontents (1985):
In the embryonic stirrings of the post-war gay movement [...] the idea of a 'minority' status was a radical one because it stressed self-activity, self-consciousness and political alliances. The concept was intended as a mobilising call, stressing what homosexuals had in common rather than what divided them.
But when the hoped-for mass gay movement did at last emerge in the late 1960s the idea of a gay minority had a different fate. The chief radical intent of the early gay liberation movement was to disrupt fixed expectations that homosexuality was a peculiar condition or minority experience. Building in large part on the celebration of a polymorphously perverse sexuality in the work of Marcuse and the radical Freudians, homosexuality was perceived as a potentiality in all of us. Early theorists of gay liberation looked forward to the 'end of the homosexual', the breaking down of socially constructed divisions between sexual subjects. A radical separation was proposed between homosexuality, which was about sexual preference, and 'gayness', which was about a subversively political way of life. Now in a neat ruse of history it was the less radical elements in gay liberation who took up the idea of a gay minority. A polymorphously perverse 'gayness' looked forward to a breakdown of roles, identities, and fixed expectations. But the new spokespeople, acting openly for the 'gay minority', argued for 'rights', for the legitimate claims to space of what was now an almost 'ethnic' identity, and became the new integrationists. The consolidation of a minority status has obvious advantages. It fits easily into the common discourse of liberal pluralist societies. It offers legitimacy to the claims of the oppressed minority and can act as a spur for legal and other reforms. It is also, as the ex-Communist founders of Mattachine saw, a mobilising idea: it might be a myth, but it is a powerful and believable one.
It has, of course, become more than an idea. In the creation of urban communities throughout the cities of the west gays have become an effective minority force, with a complex culture, varied politics and material resources. Gay people have invested a great deal in coming out as homosexual, have often risked careers, friendships and family ties. They have also gained much by their openness, political activity and culture-constructing work: they have consolidated their personal and social identities. In such circumstances challenges to the fixity and permanence of the gay identity and the idea of a gay minority seem a fundamental undermining of all that has been achieved.
There are, however, disadvantages. A number of writers have pointed to the paradox that gay activists began by challenging the naturalness and inevitability of received roles and identities, but have themselves become key definers of a homosexual role, and hence their own source of regulation [...]
The result could be a new sort of sexual conservatism, where little can be risked because too much is at stake. Moreover, in the process, the work of challenging the hegemonic definitions of sexual normality is abandoned: sexual minorities by definition can never become majorities. The acceptance of homosexuality as a minority experience deliberately emphasises the ghettoisation of homosexual experience and by implication fails to interrogate the inevitability of heterosexuality. The emphasis on minority status may be a necessary phase of gay mobilisation, but it is doubtful whether it can be the last word.
