Who Gets to Decide?

As I read Gay New York, I can't help but think "Who gets to decide?"  Who gets to decide what is acceptable?  Why does society shun that which is different or new?  When did this phenomenon start? What is its root? 

Doctorow writes, in a section about the revulsion against gay life (this also connects to my last blog post about masculinity):

"The revulsion against gay life in the early 1930s was part of a larger reaction to the perceived 'excesses' of the Prohibition years and the blurring of the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable public sociability.  But it also reflected the crisis in gender arrangements precipitated by the Depression.  As many men lost their jobs, their status as breadwinners, and their sense of mastery over their own futures, the central tenets undergirding their gender status were threatened.  A plethora of sociological studies of 'The Unemployed Man and His Family' reflected a widespread concern that massive male unemployment and job insecurity had upset gender relations and diminished the status of men in the family.  The reaction against the challenges posed to manhood by Depression dconditions was widely evident in the culture, from the celbration of pwoerful male physicques in the public art of the New Deal to the attacks on married women for 'stealing' men's jobs and the laws passed by several states requiring women to be dismissed from teaching jobs when they married.  Lesbians and gay men began to seem more dangerous in this context - as figures whose defiant perversity threatened to undermine the reproduction of normative gender and sexual arrangements already threatened by the upheavals of the thirties.  The new laws forbidding gay people to gather openly with heterosexuals in licensed restaurants and bars and banning even the representation of homosexuality bespoke a fear that gender arrangements were so fragile, even a glimpse of an alternative might endanger them.  The risk seemed so palpable that special attention was not even given to the threats such contact or images posed to impressionable young people - the usual vehicle for the expression fo fears about social reproduction.  Even the adults who patronized TImes Square nightclubs needed to be protected from them" (353-354).

Why did society have to try so hard in order to stop a movement that wouldn't be stopped?  Why is change such a bad thing?  I have question after question...

I think of gender roles as socially acceptable.  Society accepted them, created them even, and so therefore they were good. When they were threatened, society was threatened.  Sex roles, however, were never really defined by society.  It was just assumed that everyone was straight.  Because these were undefined, when homosexuality came along, it threw society into an uproar.  Add on top of that the women who wanted to change their gender roles, and it's no wonder why society felt threatened.

But why is society threatened by change?

Where did this threat originiate?

And does it still exist?