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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Social Movements
- Sprache: Englisch
In recent years, there has been substantial progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights in the United States. We are now, though, in a time of incredible political uncertainty for queer people. LGBTQ Social Movements provides an accessible introduction to mainstream LGBTQ movements in the US, illustrating the many forms that LGBTQ activism has taken since the mid-twentieth century. Covering a range of topics, including the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation, AIDS politics, queer activism, marriage equality fights, youth action, and bisexual and transgender justice, Lisa M. Stulberg explores how marginalized people and communities have used a wide range of political and cultural tools to demand and create change. The five key themes that guide the book are assimilationism and liberationism as complex strategies for equality, the limits and possibilities of legal change, the role of art and popular culture in social change, the interconnectedness of social movements, and the role of privilege in movement organizing. This book is an important tool for understanding current LGBTQ politics and will be essential reading for students and scholars of sexuality, LGBTQ studies, and social movements, as well as anyone new to thinking about these issues.
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Seitenzahl: 410
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Notes
2 Before and After Stonewall
Culture, Community, and Organizing Before Stonewall
Stonewall
Gay Liberation and the Organizational Revolution after Stonewall
The Emboldened Right Responds
Beyond Stonewall
Notes
3 Activism in the Early Days of AIDS
Science, Media, and the Beginning of AIDS
The Right Ignores and Responds
The AIDS Movement: Both Liberationist and Assimilationist
From AIDS Activism to Gay, Lesbian, and Queer
The Art and Popular Culture of AIDS
HIV and AIDS after the “Protease Moment”
The Political Legacies of AIDS
Notes
4 Marriage Politics
Worldwide Marriage Equality: An Overview
Assimilation vs. Liberation: Is Marriage Too “Normal”?
The Right’s “Defense” of Traditional Marriage
Changing Laws, Locally and Nationally
Popular Culture, Celebrity, and Marriage
Marriage, Privilege, and the LGBTQ Civil Rights Movement
After Marriage
Notes
5 LGBTQ Youth and Social Change
LGBTQ Young People in the US
Young People Changing Their Schools: GSA Organizing
Media, Visibility, and Community: The It Gets Better Project
Hearts and Minds
Notes
6 The “B” and the “T”
The Historical Fight for Bi Inclusion and Visibility
The Historical Fight for Trans Inclusion and Visibility
Current Bi Marginalization and Response
Current Trans Exclusion and Response
Trans in the Age of Trump
Notes
7 Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Social Movements series
Colin J. Beck, Radicals, Revolutionaries, and TerroristsStephanie Luce, Labor Movements: Global PerspectivesLisa M. Stulberg, LGBTQ Social MovementsDavid Walls, Community Organizing: Fanning the Flame of Democracy
LGBTQ Social Movements
Lisa M. Stulberg
polity
Copyright © Lisa M. Stulberg 2018
The right of Lisa M. Stulberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medord, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2740-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stulberg, Lisa M., author.Title: LGBTQ social movements / Lisa M. Stulberg.Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2017] | Series: Social movements | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017023462 (print) | LCCN 2017031945 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509527397 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509527403 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745656076 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745656083 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Gay liberation movement--United States | Sexual minorities--United States.Classification: LCC HQ76.8.U5 (ebook) | LCC HQ76.8.U5 S78 2017 (print) | DDC 306.760973--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023462
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I love that feeling just before I start to read a new book. I take it all in before I even read a word: the cover design, the feel of the paper, the typeface, the Table of Contents. No matter where I am or how quickly I have to digest a book, whether I’m reading fiction or nonfiction, for pleasure or for work, I am immediately calmed when I read. Put a book in my hand on a crowded subway and I’m good. Everything just melts away, and it’s just me and the pages. And starting a new book is especially exciting. I just know I’m about to start feeling something, or learning something, falling in love with some quirky and flawed character, writing furiously in the margins, staying up way too late reading by the light of my phone.
And it all starts with the Acknowledgments for me. Acknowledgments are the first thing I read when I start any book. I said this once in a class, and I got a much more surprised reaction from my students than I would have expected. It doesn’t seem that weird to me, but I guess it is. For me, Acknowledgments are a window into the personality and the relationships of the author. They are usually written in a different voice from the text itself, and I love hearing how the author’s voice sounds when they’re not working so hard to be artful or articulate. I feel like I’m learning something about the way they rely on people, who they have in their lives, their sense of humor and humility and gratitude.
Anyway, all that is to say that these Acknowledgments sections are very important to me, and I want to make sure I don’t forget anyone. I apologize in advance to those I have inevitably left out here.
First, thank you to the amazing staff at Polity. Emma Longstaff initially expressed interest in this book and was my first editor at the press. Her enthusiasm and support were incredibly motivating and appreciated, and I will always be grateful to her. Jonathan Skerrett has been a wonderful editor of the project – always so accessible and insightful. My copyeditor, Sarah Dancy, had great attention to detail and the amazing ability to put up with me and all of my anxious notes. Thanks too to Geraldine Beare for compiling the index. The team at Polity – including Amy Williams, Adrienn Jelinek, Neil de Cort, and Rachel Moore – has been a pleasure to work with. I have to say, I got the most helpful and thorough reviews of the initial manuscript of any I’ve ever received on any project. Thanks so much to these three anonymous reviewers for their feedback - the book is immeasurably stronger because of it – and to the Polity team for soliciting these wonderful reviews.
Claudia Castañeda, editor extraordinaire, read the entire manuscript draft twice and was exceedingly patient and responsive to all of my questions and concerns. I can’t imagine having written this without her feedback and input. Of course, all of the book’s shortcomings are my own.
This project began because I wanted to write the kind of book that I could use in the kinds of classes I teach at New York University. At NYU, I have had incredible friends, colleagues, and students who have supported me and the book in so many ways over the years. The Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities has been by home at NYU for 15 years, and I am so grateful for it. The NYU Steinhardt PhD students who have been especially supportive of this project include Bryan Rosenberg, Nina Mauceri, Hilary Lustick, Maggie Fay, and Sarah Klevan. Undergrads in my spring 2016 and spring 2017 Social Movements classes read and engaged with earlier drafts of the book in ways that were incredibly helpful to me along the way. Thanks, especially, to Besjana Hoxha, Marcha Johnson, Samantha Padavick, and Jordan Reynolds, for being willing to read and give feedback on draft chapters. The NYU LGBTQ working group - an amazing group of faculty, students, and staff – gave me a close read, valuable time, a supportive community, and incisive feedback along the way. Sebastian Cherng provided a crucial cover suggestion at a critical moment. Joe Salvatore has taught me so much over the years and has always been a willing, supportive, and caring listener, colleague, and friend – and also great with cover design feedback!
Then there are those friends who just always ask, in exactly the right way, how my writing is going, and they are always there to celebrate accomplishments, to weigh in on small decisions, and to lend encouragement and fun diversion when exhaustion sets in. For this project, those friends and family members especially include Ian Stulberg and Bob Berman, Lauri Hornik, Tony Chen, John and Melissa King, Cori Flam Meltzer and Brad Meltzer, and members of “the fam” text group who always have grammar advice and cute Bitmojis to share at any time of the day or night. And, while I cannot thank him directly, the late Eric Rofes has frequent conversations with me about this book, even if he doesn’t know it. I am regularly inspired by the example he set of how to live life, do politics, write, and teach.
Thanks go, too, to my local coffee shop – you know who you are – for allowing me to sit there for hours with my wall of books, nursing my extra large decaf iced coffee with extra ice. Thanks, too, to our miniature poodle, Gryffindor (Griffy) for keeping my feet warm while I wrote and for never minding when I needed to take walks or runs with her while my head was in this book. And to the late George Michael, thanks for getting me through a last, intense week of writing the first draft of this book, especially the song “Freedom,” which I played basically incessantly. I like to think that the lyrics “sometimes the clothes do not make the man” are not just a commentary about fame but are also, in the context of this project, a comment on the complexities of gender.
Finally, to my amazing, incredible family – the East Coast and Midwest contingents – I love who you are and I love who you allow me to be. Any sentence that I’ve started and deleted over and over here does not do justice to just how much you mean to me and how much purpose you give my life. To all of the young people in my immediate and extended family and the young people whom our kids have brought into our lives: I am in awe of how brave, generous, social justice-minded, and loving you are, and I can’t wait for you to write the next chapter of this ongoing story of social change.
2Before and After Stonewall
One hot summer night in June of 1969, at the seedy Stonewall Inn bar in the heart of New York City’s West Village, a diverse group of gender and sexual minorities stood up to the police brutality and repression that had become so familiar to them. The Stonewall Inn was not the first or only place that LGBTQ people had fought back. But it was the one that stuck, the one that sparked an organizational revolution that led to the modern LGBTQ movement. It is probably the one you know about, if you are familiar at all with LGBTQ history in the US. It is where most popular accounts of the mass movement for LGBTQ social justice tends to start. Yet to understand the ways in which LGBTQ people have defined and understood themselves in the US, built communities, and developed a complex and wide-ranging set of politics, we need to reach back further in history, to the early twentieth century. Stonewall was a beginning, but it was also a culmination.
By learning a bit about this history, we can find the roots of some of the key themes of the modern LGBTQ movements. First, we see that social organizing and resistance take many forms. We see that early gay liberationists organized mass demonstrations and marches, as well as smaller direct actions. We also see that people have used culture, language, and alternative institution-building to create collective identities and safe spaces for themselves that were in themselves a form of resistance. Second, we see how movements develop in relation to one another, gaining language, strategies, and confidence from other social movements of the time. Post-Stonewall movements took what they learned both directly and indirectly from civil rights, Black Power, the New Left, and second wave feminism as they built LGBTQ-focused organizations. Third, we see that some of the key ideological divisions in LGBTQ movements have their roots in the homophile movements of the post-World War II era. Perhaps the most significant of these is the division between assimilationists and liberationists (Rimmerman, 2008). This division dates at least as far back as the early 1950s. Faderman writes of a “bitter clash” in 1953 between “radicals who’d regarded homosexuals as a different species from heterosexuals” and “assimilationists who’d insisted homosexuals and heterosexuals were almost exactly the same,” which “would divide lesbian and gay communities even into the twenty-first century” (2015, p. 73). Finally, we see, in the anti-gay backlash – which developed first in an organized way during and after World War II and then with unprecedented vitality in the late 1970s with the rise of the Religious Right1 – that social action often produces a response, which then impacts and shapes subsequent social action, such that repression and revolution often occur together.
Culture, Community, and Organizing Before Stonewall
There were thriving gay and lesbian cultures, communities, and even organizations in the decades before Stonewall.2 Here, I focus on three pre-Stonewall institutions: cities, the military, and medical and psychological sciences. These were three of the most important sites for lesbian and gay visibility and community-building in the first half of the twentieth century in the US. They presented opportunities for lesbian and gay people to come together, develop distinctive cultures, and build a sense of shared experience and common language. They also, conversely, presented opportunities for state and cultural subjugation of gender and sexual minorities. This combination of increased visibility and community with heightened institutional repression created the political opening into which Stonewall emerged at the end of the 1960s.
Gay men and lesbians were creating their own vibrant and visible communities in large US cities by the beginning of the twentieth century. In Gay New York, historian George Chauncey “challenges three widespread myths” of pre-Stonewall gay life: “isolation, invisibility, and internalization” (1994, pp. 1–2). Gay men in New York City built successful institutions and neighborhoods throughout the city, developing an “immense gay world” around their city’s streets, bars, bathhouses, restaurants, and hugely popular drag balls (1994, p. 2). Rather than separating themselves, they were integrated into the social lives of their straight neighbors and neighborhoods, while inventing “a highly sophisticated system of subcultural codes – codes of dress, speech, and style – that enabled them to recognize one another on the streets, at work, and at parties and bars” (1994, p. 4). Finally, gay New Yorkers in this pre-World War II era generally did not internalize a view of themselves as “sick, criminal, and unworthy,” but instead “celebrated their difference” and pushed back against homophobia (1994, pp. 4–5).
Chauncey argues that gay culture- and community-building was itself a kind of innovative and collective “everyday resistance” that pre-dated the explicitly political organizing of the 1960s and 1970s (1994, p. 5). This included individual ways of asserting visibility and presence through, for example, fashion (like red ties) and language. Other acts of resistance were communal. Gay men in New York City made communities out of their city’s institutions: the YMCA (popularized as a gay institution, but not first discovered, by the Village People!); bathhouses that they made their own; drag balls that drew crowds of hundreds, even thousands; and local cafeterias and lunch counters. Well before Stonewall, gay New Yorkers – and people in other cities around the world – built lives and communities for themselves, fashioned out of their cities.3
While Chauncey focuses on men in New York City, Faderman (1991), Faderman and Stuart Timmons (2009), and Rupp (2009) write about the vibrant and visible lesbian urban communities that flourished during this same time in a number of other cities, in the US, Canada, and Western Europe.4 Women had more economic and cultural constraints, and some of their public communities developed a bit later than those of men; but lesbians did create thriving community institutions – like, for example, working-class lesbian bars that catered to butch-femme couples (D’Emilio, 1998; Rupp, 2009).
With increased visibility and vibrancy for urban gay men and lesbians – and in the context of 1920s and 1930s politics and economics – came increased repression. Chauncey argues that the closet did not always exist and was not inevitable, nor has the history of the past century been a story of linear progress out of the closet. Rather, the closet was a product of the mid-twentieth century, starting in the 1920s. It was a deliberate construction by the state. He contends that the apparatus of police control, surveillance, and repression that developed in a broad way during the Prohibition era was applied to gay nightlight and public socializing. So, too, the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s put many men out of work, which meant that they could not fulfill their traditional gender roles as economic providers for wives and children. “Lesbians and gay men,” Chauncey writes, “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” (1994, p. 354).
Just as cities like New York and Los Angeles provided opportunities for lesbian and gay visibility and community in the early part of the twentieth century, so the World War II-era military offered a much broader opportunity for community-building across the country. This military also proved to be a site for a new level of persecution and marginalization. The war created an institutional space that allowed people who may have been otherwise isolated from each other, who may have “grown up in rural areas or small towns and … regarded themselves as singular freaks” (Duberman 1993, p. 76), to find each other. The war also created a demand for women workers, and, with it, a new dominant narrative about femininity that allowed a broad range of women to come out of their homes and into new all-women’s communities (Faderman, 1991).
Allan Bérubé (2010) writes that the US military had not historically excluded gay service members as people. Rather, it had criminalized sodomy between men as an act – and generally had no policy at all about sex between women. As it mobilized for a massive draft for World War II, however, the Selective Service initially set a number of explicit restrictions on draftees. It excluded women, homosexuals as a category of people, and, in some branches, African Americans, on the assumption that “their integration would turn the military into a testing ground for radical social experimentation rather than a strong fighting force” (2010, p. 2). However, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the military could not afford to exclude people so categorically. And, once enlisted, gay and lesbian service members found one another, developed collective identities and a new sense of shared experience, came out, and built communities.
These new GI communities endured beyond the war years. An expanded gay and especially lesbian bar scene developed out of the war, as did the growth of enclave cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, as new veterans chose to maintain the ties they had formed in the service.5 Their experience through the war had changed gay and lesbian GIs, giving them a lasting sense of collective identity and strength and a pride in their contribution to the war effort. Their experience also gave them a sense that they constituted a group: a persecuted minority – both in and outside the military – that shared a common experience and that could and should fight for its own rights and receive the entitlements due to other GIs (Bérubé, 2010). It also brought a new experience of public community. Ghaziani argues that new urban institutions, like bars, “cemented dense social networks and inspired gays and lesbians to assert a right to gather in public places” (2014, p. 15).
World War II also brought new repression for gay and lesbian GIs. First, the military moved from a criminal justice model to a reliance on psychiatrists and a psychiatric model for defining, sussing out, and punishing homosexuality. This move was meant as a liberal and decriminalizing reform effort, but it had the effect of shifting the focus from the act of sodomy as criminal to the person of the homosexual as sick. At the time, as Bérubé argues, in the service of “pursuing their agenda of showing how psychiatry could contribute to the war effort,” psychiatrists introduced broad-reaching mental health screens for new recruits (2010, p. 9). This involved developing and administering elaborate screening tests to detect and root out any possible male homosexuals in their midst (women were less actively targeted initially).6 Repression and anti-gay panic grew all the more emphatic in the military by the late 1940s, as it no longer needed the millions of recruits it had relied on during the war. An October 1949 memo from the Department of Defense declared plainly: “Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the Armed Forces in any capacity, and prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed Forces is mandatory” (Faderman, 2015, p. 32).
In the Cold War era, when Senator Joseph McCarthy stirred up anti-Communist hysteria and a concern for national security, gay men, especially, became ready scapegoats, and military discharges increased significantly (Adam, 1995; D’Emilio, 1998). In December 1950, a Senate report urged that any “sexual pervert” should also be refused all federal jobs. Their “lack [of] emotional stability” and weak “moral fiber” were so great that they “[tend] to have a corrosive influence upon … fellow employees” (D’Emilio, 1998, p. 42). Officials further argued that (closeted) gay government workers were national security risks as they would be easy targets of blackmail. In April 1953, soon after taking office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower codified this exclusion by signing Executive Order 10450.
This unprecedented state-sponsored framing of gay and lesbian veterans and government workers as national threats played out against a postwar return to restrictive gender roles that pathologized independent and working women. Lesbians might have been allowed to be the “hero” during World War II, but they were the “sicko” of the 1950s (Faderman, 1991, p. 119). As Bérubé (2010) argues, the psychiatric framing of homosexuality as a mental illness, which had originated with military practice, became part of public culture. Gay men and lesbians were subject to police intimidation, random raids, and entrapment in bars and public spaces, even in private spaces like their homes. “Lewd and lascivious conduct” was a common charge against gay men, while women were most commonly picked up and harassed by police for the charge of “masquerading” in clothes that authorities considered masculine or for men only (Faderman & Timmons, 2009, pp. 81, 93). Amid anti-Communist fervor, gay men and lesbians during this period became “invisible enemies who could live next door and who threatened the security and safety of children, women, the family, and the nation” (Bérubé, 2010, p. 258). This framing was new (Chauncey, 1994), and – as we will see – powerfully enduring.
