Creative Concept, Narrative Strategy And Social Identity-Study On American Gay Documentaries

In the early days since America was founded, homosexual people were oppressed cruelly by the government and religious communities. Nowadays, with the development of social movements, homosexuals’status has been improved greatly, but prejudice and persecution still exist, especially in those areas known as Bible Belt, where conservative force is in charge and homosexuals are still Second-class Citizens. Gay documentaries truly represent the living situation and milestones in gay movement. Those works are of great value both for recording and social significance. This article focuses on 15 American gay documentaries from the aspects of religion, politics and society and discusses their creative concepts. Basing on the text, it analyzes different characters, thus gets to understand the social meaning contained in those documentaries. The main text is divided into three parts:The first part is about creative concepts, including authenticity, nationality and reflectivity. Authenticity is the core essential attribute of any documentary, which occurs in the splicing of individual memory - in other words, using several interviewees’narrations from several perspectives and being almost omniscient. Nationality consists of American politics and religions, whose exploration is based on Sex Politics and former study about religion and homosexuality. Reflectivity points out that according to Judith Butler’s Gender Performance Theory, gay people have subjective initiative while at the same time their societal sex and performance is restricted and shaped by environment.The second part classifies gay images in the text into three categories transgender, gay and lesbian, whose pointcut is societal gender, family role and deadly disease respectively. Simply, societal gender refers to the asymmetry between natural and physical gender and acquired psychological gender. They accept and live with the opposite gender. With the development of feminist movement, heterosexual women walk out of the kitchen and jump into the labor force, while the same time, gay women in those documentaries are returning to family. When talking about the deadly disease of gay, the four letters are known to everyone - AIDS. This paper analyzes and summarizes the documentaries related to this theme, objectively evaluates their innate political sensitivity and group behavior confronting destructive disaster.The third part extends text analysis to social meaning, acknowledging that gay images in documentaries are not only the reflection of objective reality, but also connotation established. Actually, individual identity, group identity and social identity are so tightly connected that it would be impossible to separate them thoroughly in this paper. Individual identity and identity construction are normally synchronous with group identity construction, the degree of an individual accepting himself/herself largely depends on how much the society recognizes his/her group. Positive social recognition will promote group identity and vice versa. Apparently, gay documentaries aim at positive goals. They look at the mainstream group and gay group from the perspective of cultural diversity, and look out for admission and integration with good will.