Artifact 2 A deviant group This document will explore the labeling of homosexuality as deviant and how this has

s changed from earlier historical periods to the present, as well as from culture to culture. It ancient times homosexual and homosocial behavior was deemed quite natural and acceptable in their societies; this has changed greatly over time in Western and non-Western cultures. This artifact will focus on the attitudes of the United States and African and Uganda, regarding homosexuality and its perceived defiance of social norms. The textbook, Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology, defines deviance as acts or attributes that depart in an undesirable way from a groups norms and evoke negative social reactions (Sandstrom, Lively, Martin, and Fine, 2014: 234). Attitudes and perceptions regarding homosexual men and women have ebbed and flowed from open celebration to veiled acceptance to outright condemnation depending on the powers that be and majority of the populace. For early Greeks and Romans, homosocial and homosexual expression and activity was commonplace and not considered deviant. In fact, the highest from of love was understood to be that between two men. Women in ancient times were mainly for procreation, child rearing, and other domestic duties. Centuries later in the United States during the Roaring Twenties homosexuality, though still illegal, was quietly accepted by many, especially in large liberal-minded cities such as Chicago and New York. Sex was a very private matter and not discussed in public. The Great Depression and its subsequent rise in conservatism greatly curtailed the freedoms enjoyed in the 20s. In the 1960s we see an emergence in a new world order: the Civil Rights movement, Womens Liberation, Black Power movement, the Vietnam War, assassinations of political leaders, and the gay rights movement. The status quo, white patriarchal power, was being questioned and the illusion of the perfect nuclear family, a product of the 1950s, was shattered. The pushback against these social and political calls to action from those wielding the true power was swift and immediate. Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York City became the touchstone for gay rights activation there and elsewhere in the U.S. It, like other calls for justice and equality, was viewed as an affront to the morals and social position of devout Judeo-Christians, heterosexual, conservative, racist, homophobic, and sexist individuals, the normal in contrast to the deviant. They felt homosexuality violated their belief systems and undermined their sense of a properly ordered society. For most, intimacy, sexual relationships, marriage, and creation of a family unit were, and remain, reserved for a man and woman, not same sex couples. Laws have been enacted statewide and in various foreign countries to ensure this as a reaction to the substantial progress made in the past several years for all U.S. citizens no matter their sexual or gender identity, self-labeling. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual visibility and activism has grown significantly in Caribbean and African countries in more recent years resulting in more stringent persecution and punishments by the majority. Tougher censorship laws have been created to silence and imprison this deviant segment of society, as seen in Jamaica, Egypt, Nigeria, and Uganda, to name but a few, countries with strong conservatism and devout Christians and Muslim beliefs, if only on the surface. Many resist change to the social order they know and support and seek to change, remove, or annihilate those different from them, those they perceive as threats to their way of life. Following I discuss the vehemently divisive, us-versus-them, homophobic position of the Ugandan government under its current president, Yoweri Museveni. From a sociological perspective, labeling and stigmatization are tools used by Museveni and his cronies in marking homosexuals in Uganda as deviant and outside normal society. The influence they wield in categorizing groups cannot be discounted. However, (a)ccording to conflict theorists, labeling theory fails to recognize how the ruling class controls the larger structures and institutions that shape the smaller processes and interactions that result in deviance (Sandstrom, et al., 2014: 258) as evidenced by the Ugandan legislatures passing of the recent anti-gay bill. Homosexuals become the discredited group by the larger society, in order to subvert their personal agency to affect positive change and subvert their stigmatization . Harassment, threat of imprisonment, disenfranchisement, alienation and shunning from family, friends, neighbors, church, and school are all used to push these low status groups into hiding, conversion, or at the very least passing. This negative labeling evolves into the master status for these men, women, and youth, no longer are they primarily sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, students, nurses, entertainers, or athletes. Governments in general are the rule creators and enforcers who have the power to define the parameters of morality and deviance and to subject people to stigmatizing labels and sanctions

(Sandstrom, et al., 2014: 264). Stigma is ultimately about control and an attempt to bring deviant individuals and groups into the fold of normal and appropriate thought and action. I would venture to say that many who do not embrace the label of deviant may experience a rupture in ideas of self, how they see themselves and wish to be seen by others. Particularly for identities that are not by choice but nature and circumstance (i.e. physical impairments, skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation) possibly develop a spiritual malaise, feelings of incompleteness and fracturing. I for one have felt emotionally distant from those I love and that love me when thinking of myself as abnormal, improper or deviant. This has been, and still is to a degree, especially true when I have not been comfortable coming out to those close to me, down playing my gayness or passing as heterosexual. I have attempted to destigmatize the negative attributes assumed by the popular homophobic imagination shared by many. One of the stages of deviance as studied in labeling theory, tertiary deviance, can be applied here. Though the attitudes and meanings behind deviant identification of homosexuality has changed over time and place, we must work on establishing a more holistic and affirming approach in considering what, how, and why something, or someone, is marked as deviant.