T
he gay rights movement has hit a brick wall.
Yes, we have same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. Yes, the Supreme
Court overturned state anti-sodomy laws. Yes, gay characters are
all over mainstream TV. Still, after 35 years of slow, incremental
progress, we are at a decisive crossroads. Simply put: to bring
about social change—dependent on truly transforming hearts
and minds—we need to reassess what kind of a movement we want
it to be. Will it be a movement that continues arguing, with diminishing
success, for the rights of its own people—and even at that,
only for those who want to formalize a relationship? Or will we
argue for a broader vision of justice and fairness that includes
all Americans? If the movement does not choose the latter course,
we risk becoming not just irrelevant, but a political stumbling
block to progressive social change in general.
The right template for the future can be found in the gay rights
movement’s own history, in the insights of gay liberation—the
radical, grassroots politics that emerged in the June 1969 Stonewall
Riots when queers fought in the streets of Greenwich Village for
three days to protest police harassment.
A week after those street riots came to an end the Gay Liberation
Front (GLF) was formed. While its original membership included drag
queens, ragtag queer youth, and old-time reformist gay activists,
it was spearheaded by men and women seasoned in progressive, coalition-based
politics with ties to labor groups, women’s liberation, peace
groups, economic justice organizations, and black and latino liberation
groups. In addition, almost everyone was engaged in some aspect
of the national movement to stop the war in Vietnam. And—no
surprise—all of these people were influenced by the late-1960s
culture of anti-authoritarianism, sexual freedom, and personal liberation
that was sweeping the country. While I was not at the Stonewall
Riots, I did join GLF shortly after it formed. I was a 20- year-old
lower middle-class college student active in Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) and anti-war protests. The idea of a politics that
acknowledged, indeed was predicated on, my sexual desires was initially
mind-boggling. This became the cornerstone that made my other political
work make sense.
Gay liberationists have learned a lot over the past 35 years as
we’ve watched post-colonial liberation struggles give rise
to Islamic fundamentalism; watched a deeply reactionary fundamentalist
Christian constituency take center stage in U.S. politics, endured
the ravages of AIDS, and, yes, enjoyed some of the piecemeal gains
made by the fight for gay rights. But it’s time to incorporate
those lessons into the foundation we laid long ago, which provides
a much sounder basis for the future than anything based on the limited
notion equal rights for gays can offer.
GLF wasn’t fueled just by sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It
was part of a worldwide political movement committed to social justice
both nationally and internationally. Its name—Gay Liberation
Front— came from the newly formed Woman’s Liberation Front,
which in turn was taken from the North Vietnamese’s National
Liberation Front and various calls for black liberation that had
spun off from the civil rights movement. These queer activists pursued
coalitions with a wide range of progressive political groups, including
the Black Panthers, National Organization for Women, anti-Vietnam
war groups, and labor unions.
Not all of these coalitions were successful—although Huey Newton,
the Black Panthers leader, supported gay liberation—but they
marked the beginning of a coalition-based movement for gay rights
that could have become larger and stronger.
B
y early 1970 more moderate,
strategically limited gay organizations formed. These groups—
Gay Activists Alliance and National Gay Task Force were the largest—focused
on the far more narrowly defined concept of “gay rights.”
They argued that freedom for gay men and lesbians would be best
achieved not by addressing anti-gay discrimination as part of a
larger pattern of discrimination in the U.S., but by focusing on
specific legal inequalities that only affected homosexuals. This
strategy resulted in a mindset of strict legalism that hindered
the gay move- ment’s growth and effectiveness.
The singular theme of the more limited rights-based movement was
that “gay people were just like everyone else,” by which
it meant heterosexuals. This was a wrong move, predicated on the
ridiculous notion that heterosexuals were all alike, with no differences—class,
racial, ethnic, sexual—among them. The gay rights movement
not only ignored the myriad differences within each group, they
ignored the shared similarities—and potential points of connection—that
existed between the groups.
As a result, the gay rights movement became culturally and politically
isolated, as liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s gave way to identity
politics. By focusing only on legal inequalities—albeit, an
important aspect of seeking basic civil rights—the movement
never argued, as the African American civil rights movement did,
for a comprehensive vision of social justice.
A clear example of this tunnel vision lies in the movement’s
long- time insistence on fighting for the right to sexual and personal
privacy. While the aim of the fight for privacy was to keep the
government out of people’s bedrooms (a good thing), it also
perpetuated the idiotic and incorrect idea that homosexuality was
a completely separate aspect of a person’s identity. The “privacy”
argument was attractive to mainstream culture because it kept gay
people invisible. But the downside was that it also continued the
social isolation of gay people, removing them from the public sphere.
A right to privacy is no help to the openly queer high- school student
who is forbidden by school administrators from forming a gay-straight
alliance or wearing a gay T-shirt in the hallways. The right to
privacy is of no use to the gay man who is visibly living with HIV/AIDS
or to the lesbian couple with kids facing discrimination in school
or housing.
Perhaps the best and most recent example of the fallout from this
single-issue mindset can be seen in the fight for same-sex marriage.
True, the marriage equality movement scored a big win in Massachusetts.
But this single win generated an enormous national backlash resulting
in 17 states passing constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex
marriage. In eight of those states the amendment language also prohibits
civil unions and, in some cases, other legal protections, such as
private-sector domestic-partnership programs. The Massachusetts
win also piqued substantial interest in a constitutional amendment
that would ban gay marriage on the federal level.
This didn’t have to happen. For instance, queer activists and
academics Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim (she is chair of American
Studies at New York University where he is a graduate student) suggest
in a July 18, 2005
Nation
article “Beyond Gay Marriage”
that, “in order to counter conservative Republican strategy…gay
activists and progressives will have to come together to reframe
the marriage debate” by building coalitions with labor activists
and economic justice advocates to promote marriage as one of many
ways individuals and households might access badly needed benefits.
Duggan and Kim argue that the gay rights movement might have been
far more successful by working in coalition with other groups and
arguing for a comprehensive system of social and economic protections
for all families and household groupings.
This is political organizing 101 —find people with shared interests
and bring them together to enact social change. But, in many ways,
the gay rights movement never passed “political organizing
101” so this would be a total revamping and revisioning of
how “gay politics” have traditionally been done. Indeed,
it strikes at the heart of what has been wrong with the gay rights
movement for three decades —its myopic view of what “justice”
might mean. The gay rights platform—“equal rights for
gay people”—has never seriously grappled with the hard
fact that many gay people had rights based on wealth, race, gender,
class status that other gay people didn’t have. But worse than
that, it has refused to embrace a grander vision—a moral vision—
of how the world might be better for everyone.
The gay rights movement has learned a great deal from the civil
rights movement’s anti-discrimination legal models to fight
the overwhelming discrimination lesbians and gay men face in jobs
and housing. Yet, national gay rights groups never thought of forming
political or strategic alliances with the civil rights groups that
pioneered this type of legislation. When fighting for the rights
of gay men and lesbians to adopt and parent children, the gay rights
movement never took a broader stand on children’s rights and
health. While it is true that the movement often sought endorsements
from groups such as the National Association of Social Workers,
claiming that gay people could be fine parents, they never worked
closely with these groups on larger issues relating to families
and children. When fighting for the right of gay people to be in
the military, they rarely grappled with the basic economic and class
biases of how the military is constituted, not to mention the role
of militarism in U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps the most shocking
example of this refusal to entertain and enact a larger political
and moral vision is that, after hundreds of thousands of gay deaths
from AIDS, not one national gay rights or AIDS group broached the
issue of universal health care or some other modification in the
broken U.S. heath-care system.
W
ill a return to the political
and moral vision of gay liberation be the best way to enact such
changes? Well, yes and no. The vision of the Gay Liberation Movement
to radically reorder the entire world on the principles of justice,
fairness, and individual and collective freedom could not work in
1970 and will not work now. In the best tradition of utopianism,
gay liberation was maddeningly ambiguous, incredibly naïve,
and wildly impractical. It refused to take seriously the impact
and importance of religion in people’s lives. It also turned
a blind eye to deeply entrenched gender traditions and was woefully
ignorant about money and the workings of capitalism, relying instead
on romanticized notions of pre-industrial economics.
The movement was also naïve in its view of human nature, feeling
that people—and groups—would simply do the right thing
because it was the right thing. So while they understood the concept
of coalition politics, often they didn’t understand how to
make those arguments convincingly and portrayed an almost comic
insensitivity to the cultural and political differences among organizations.
For instance, taking its cues from second wave feminism, GLF was
adamantly against “macho” as a style of masculinity and
celebrated a playful, gender-challenging male affect. But it had
no ability to understand how black men—long subjugated as “boys”
by white culture—would want to lionize their new found, aggressively
masculine political personae. (Similarly, black leaders such as
Eldridge Clever would attack openly gay black men such as James
Baldwin as “faggots” and betrayers of black pride.) Very
problematically, men in GLF would promote a newly-found sexual freedom,
disregarding the fact that the experience of many feminists was
that sex was a male weapon and “sexual liberation” was
yet another patriarchal straight male ploy to further exploit them.
But despite these problems, the early Gay Liberation Front
never believed in strict identity politics or a zero-sum approach
to politics. Rather than seeing human and civil rights as identity
specific they understood that if everyone worked together, there
would be no losers. It also believed that truly productive political
work could only occur when the full needs of all people— economic,
health, safety, housing, spiritual, and sexual—were addressed
and met.
Luckily, there are signs that changes are under way. When lesbian
commentator Jasmin Cannick argued on her website (jasmyne cannick.typepad.com)
that the rights of native-born gay men and lesbians were more important
than those of illegal immigrants, she was criticized by other gay
activists. Over the past year, lesbian activist and civil rights
lawyer Chai Feldbaum has argued, persuasively, that rather than
hiding behind the slogan “gay people are just like everyone
else,” facing sexual differences is important and that the
best argument for same-sex marriage is that “gay sex is good.”
Even Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force, spoke in the human rights idiom of gay liberation
when he told
Bay Windows
in January, “There is still
a question of our fundamental humanity and equality. Either we’re
fully equal and fully human or we are not. There is no other way
to frame it.”
Foreman’s radical recasting of gay politics, coming from a
national gay rights spokesperson, is welcome even if it is more
than three decades late. But if gay politics is going to survive
and prosper, as it faces increasingly intense pressure over the
next few years, it will have to continue committing itself to just
such a new vision of openness, self-respect, and fairness—for
all.
Michael
Bronski teaches Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at Dartmouth
College. His last book is
Pulp Friction: Uncovering
the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps
(St. Martin’s Press, 2003).
