Role‐playing substitutions among homosexuals

Abstract

The social relationships that exist among individuals in deviant counter-cultures is still not well understood by those not involved in such activities. Social scientists have made some attempts at research into deviant behavior and have produced a few very good studies from time to time, but the field has scarcely been touched on to any great extent. Part of this problem is no doubt due to the difficulty of gathering reliable material. This fact is, of course, true in many kinds of research, but the clandestine and often illegal nature of deviant behavior often makes respondents who engage in it less than candid with interviewers, putting an additional burden on the researcher. Another reason for ignorance of deviant life-styles is that what research has been done has been inadequate and has often skirted the issues. Studies of deviance are inadequate in two ways for the theorizing that has to be done: 1. There are just not enough studies in the first place, and 2. Those that have been done do not provide enough facts about the lives of deviants as they live them. (Becker, 1963) This ignorance unhappily exists among professionals as well as lay people. Homosexuals are possibly the single largest deviant counter-culture in this country, but very often are not visible in the sense that some other deviants may be, except for the extreme overt types. According to earlier research on sexual deviants, homosexuals form social groups of varying degrees of cohesion and carry on many and sometimes nearly all of their social relationships within these groups. Studies have also revealed a number of the roles that are played by various individuals within the homosexual in-groups, but we are still far from an understanding what functions many of these roles have for the individuals concerned. One theory is that deviants who associate in a counter-cultural ambience attempt to duplicate as nearly as possible many of the most important social roles and interactions that exist in the normal society. If so, this phenomenon would imply that the expected social roles and statuses that have been accepted by the larger society are socialized very strongly into the young, and that even if individuals