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WHEN MEMORY AND SEXUALITY COLLIDE: THE HOMOSENTIMENTAL STYLE OF GAY LIBERATION
Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2018
Commemorating both the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the subsequent Gay Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Monument projects a quiet, muted homosexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the courageous and violent assertion of homosexual identity that was Stonewall. Our essay examines this strange incongruity, revealing in the process the homosentimental style-a unique rhetorical form that attempts to negotiate the many contradictory motives animating LGBT advocacy. The Gay Liberation Monument's use of homosentimentality refracts in many directions, simultaneously challenging dehumanizing rhetorics with affective appeals to care and friendship, presenting itself as assimilationist even as it offers coded indices of clone culture, and producing a doubled homosexual body-at once assimilationist and queer. Both the monument and the homosentimental style thus pose a challenge to binary conceptualizations of LGBT rights advocacy that separate assimilationist and queer politics.
Gay and Lesbian Subcultures from Stonewall to Angels in America
The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (ed. Brian McHale and Len Platt) Cambridge University Press), 2015
This chapter’s title would appear to provide an inauspicious frame for a discussion of the relationship between gay and lesbian writing and postmodernism. On the one hand, it projects a linear history which imagines sexual minorities advancing from marginalization and oppression and towards mainstream recognition and success. On the other, it seems to go nowhere at all, suggesting that gay and lesbian culture is coterminous with New York City. The account that follows then promises to be one that denies difference and ignores discontinuity – not exactly moves ordinarily associated with postmodern narrative and politics. But while the Stonewall riots of 1969 have commonly been understood as a historical watershed, indeed, the moment at which sexual minorities in the West began to take control of their own history, they are also frequently invoked precisely to express concerns about the way other configurations of same-sex intimacy – in particular, those of earlier times and of places outside of the American metropolis – have been occulted by this master narrative. And then Tony Kushner’s celebrated epic play Angels in America (1990, 1992) is not meant to mark some terminal point at which gay cultural production has become part of the establishment firmament or has developed fully fledged postmodern credentials. Rather, the play typifies the way gay and lesbian writing from this period elaborates multiple histories, competing ideological paradigms and interactions across non-contiguous spaces, even while remaining committed to a clear sense of futurity and a politics rooted in a specific community. Indeed, the similarities between the gay liberation movement, which arose immediately after the Stonewall riots, and Angels – both for instance articulate the situated knowledge of sexual dissidents, while simultaneously offering up millenarian visions to the world – indicate how this chapter is little concerned to chart the progress of a putatively postmodern mode of gay and lesbian writing. Instead, it examines a range of material by British and American authors in order to highlight the close affinities yet frequently ambivalent involvement between gay and lesbian culture and postmodernism. Most of the works discussed below – novels, biography, poetry, as well as Kushner’s play – revel in the pleasures of postmodern textual manoeuvres, and recognize their utility: their potential for subversion, and their capacity to foreground contingency, diversity and dissonance. These impulses sometimes coincide with, but often run counter to, other needs – to account for embodiment, in particular the embodiment of sexual desire, and to claim a cultural inheritance and articulate a coherent collective identity which might provide the basis for solidarity and political action.
The "Post" in the Past: Queer Radicalism - in the Spirit of Stonewall
According to a famous image of Walter Benjamin, the Angel of History is propelled into the future by a violent storm blowing from paradise, but keeps his face turned toward the wreckages of the past. In times of crisis looking forwards seems to be compulsory: we are asked to sacrify our present for the future, and at the same time the future is paradoxically coinceived as but a repetition of the present. If on the other hand we try to be maverick or angelical enough to look backwards, we may discover that the 'post' of our democratic politics may be already in our past. This pages will focus on gay liberation mouvements of the Seventies in order to investigate how their radicalism represents an alternative to the progressivism of present mouvements for the civil rights of gay, lesbian and trans people.
The popular narrative of the gay rights movement in the United States has often unfairly emphasized the importance of the Stonewall Riots. At his second inaugural address in January of 2013, President Barack Obama reinforced the primacy of Stonewall by associating it with other milestone events in the ongoing struggle for social equality, "We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall." Although the Riots were an undoubtedly significant moment in the history of the movement, the emphasis placed upon them obscures a more nuanced transition between the conservative principles and tactics employed by the homophiles in the 1950s and 60s and the outspoken and confrontational activism of the gay liberationists who appeared in the 1970s. This piece contributes to the existing historiography in three ways. First, I use a new methodological lens (Social Movement Theory) to reexamine the historical narrative of the gay rights movement. By focusing this lens on the actions of the Mattachine Society and, more generally, on the east coast homophile organizations, this paper identifies a protracted development from mobilization in the early 1950s, through “assimilationism,” and eventually to “liberation” in the early 1970s. In the course of this reexamination, I use primary and secondary documents to focus on several often ignored events that clearly illustrate a transition in the principles and tactical repertoire of the gay rights movement. By adding the ECHO conferences, NACHO conventions, and ERCHO meetings to the historical narrative this piece helps reorient the Stonewall Riots. Finally, and more abstractly, this piece returns to the common historiographic issues of identity and community. The organizations and individuals studied in this piece wrestled with the idea and/or nature of “gay community” and the role of sexuality in the construction of their personal identities. The introduction of this piece addresses the major thematic trends and chronological tropes in the historiography of the gay rights movement. Section one begins the narrative in earnest by providing a thorough history of the Mattachine Society and the regional conferences organized by the “East Coast Homophile Organizations.” Section two continues the narrative by describing the national meetings of the “North American Conference of Homophile Organizations” and the radicalization of the “East Coast Homophile Organizations.” Finally, the paper concludes with a section that explores recent historiographic trends and the importance of continued historical study for the future of the gay rights movement.
The unfinished revolution: social movement theory and the gay and lesbian movement
Choice Reviews Online, 2002
Tracing the rainbow: an historical sketch of the American gay and lesbian movement To be overtly homosexual, in a culture that denigrates and hates homosexuals, is to be political. An historical analysis of the American gay and lesbian movement utilizing the political process model seeks to answer a variety of questions. What changing opportunity enabled the movement even to be contemplated? What types of organizations existed to capitalize on this opportunity? When did members of this disenfranchized minority realize their inherent agential power thereby experiencing cognitive liberation? What organizations did the movement spur? What type of response did the movement elicit from both the government and other citizens? How has the movement changed over the course of its existence? What factors have in¯uenced this change? This chapter attempts to address these questions by sketching the evolution of the American gay and lesbian movement throughout the post-war period. Starting with an analysis of the effect of the Second World War on homosexual identity and community, this chapter traces the development of the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s, explores the effect of the Stonewall riots of 1969, examines the ideology of gay liberation in the 1970s, analyzes the complex impact of AIDS on the movement, and assesses current notions of gay and lesbian visibility and the present status of the movement. Although homosexuals have obviously existed before this time, and a homosexual subculture had been emerging since the late nineteenth century, the onset of the Second World War ushered in a new era of visibility that would profoundly shape not just the lives of American gay men and lesbians, but question the understanding of sexuality itself. Despite and sometimes because of the mounting political war against them, the generation of the Second World War gay veterans did ®nd ways to break through