HOW DID the gay liberation movement of the 1970s evolve into the “LGBTQ” lineup of letters that we have today, and what are the implications for building a movement out of such divergent sexual and gender minorities? I offer here a thumbnail history of this accretion process from Stonewall to today. A look at some of the combinations that have been proposed in the interest of inclusiveness gives a sense of the endless, and even at times whimsical, manifestations of this process. Each letter corresponds to a particular “identity” or interest group, and this historical process has tracked closely with a shift away from the sexual liberationist goals of the 1970s to the identity politics that has come to dominate the movement.
Letters, We Get Letters…
Following Stonewall, the movement for homosexual rights was called simply “gay liberation”—a founding organization was the Gay Liberation Front—and it included both men and women. Four years later, in 1973, that was still the case when a few former leaders of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance announced that they were forming the National Gay Task Force, which was to be a top-down organization rather than a democratic body. (NGTF subsequently changed to ngltf and is now the National LGBTQ Task Force.)
By the mid-1970s, as the women’s liberation movement expanded its reach—with lesbians playing a conspicuous role—lesbians chafed at their invisibility in gay organizations that were run mostly by men. The desire to build a coalition of men and women led to the relatively smooth transition to “gay and lesbian” liberation as the 1970s turned into the 1980s.
Feminism in this era also gave birth to a phenomenon called “political lesbianism”—women who identified as lesbian even though they did not engage in sex with other women. It was inspired by Ti-Grace Atkinson’s assertion that “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice.” These feminists explicitly rejected the importance of sex as a marker of sexual orientation; it was the rejection of men that mattered. Needless to say, nothing similar emerged among gay men, who remained politically gay only to the extent that they had (or wanted) sex with other men. What’s more, this marriage between identity politics and anti-sex tendencies lives on in the “LGBTQ” pileup, which unites a number of de-sexed identities around a narrow set of political causes.
Until the late 1980s, “lesbian” and “gay” were specified in no particular order in the names of organizations or events. The 1987 New York Pride Guide, for example, used “gay and lesbian,” while the 1987 March on Washington used “lesbian and gay.” However, over time “lesbian” came to occupy the first position most of the time. In the 1980s, the “B” was gradually added, and by the 1990s, GLBT or LGBT had become the generally used label. The “Q” is a more recent addition that has now become the standard in most mainstream media style manuals.
A typical evolution is documented in a 2006 booklet published by the Duluth–Superior Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Allied, Queer, and Intersex (glbtaqi) Pride Committee. Established in 1986 as Gay and Lesbian Pride in 1991, it became the Twin Ports Gay and Lesbian Pride Committee. The next year, they added “Bisexual” to their name, followed by “Transgender” in 1995. The next year, they changed their name to Duluth–Superior GLBT Pride. In 2001, “Allied” was added, followed by “Queer” in 2002. Finally, the addition of “Intersex” produced the unwieldy glbtaqi. The 2006 manual refers to the “glbtaqi community,” but it’s hard to see how the word “community” can apply to such a hodgepodge of separate identities.
A standard configuration of identities in some LGBT style manuals is the following mouthful: LGBTQQIAA2S, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, allied, asexual, two-spirit. A group called Queers for Economic Justice came up with its own version: lgbtgnc (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming). A number of years ago, a leaflet from a caucus of New York’s Occupy Wall Street took this to a bizarre extreme—lgbtiqa2z—by tacking on “2Z” at the end. This addition apparently takes advantage of the “A” to evoke the phrase “A to Z,” presumably so as to include any group not already represented.
Another example comes from this magazine’s January-February 2016 issue: an interview with Dan Savage, author, columnist, and founder of “It Gets Better,” conducted by Suzanne Stroh:
Suzanne Stroh: I saw one abbreviation that contained something like twelve letters. I think it was LGBTQQIP2SAA. Some letters I can’t even guess.
Dan Savage: Lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit, asexual—and I don’t know what the other A is [probably “allied”]. What you left out was LF, which I’ve seen, which stands for Leather Fetish, and on and on and on. I think we should sing the alphabet song twice to get those Qs in there twice, and be done with it.
The ever-expanding series is intended to indicate diversity and inclusivity, announcing that it encompasses all sexual and gender identities—or at least all that are politically acceptable. It does not, for example, include intergenerational sex or sadomasochism, among other sexual orientations deemed unacceptable by the powers-that-be. The former in particular has fallen out of favor, even though pederasty has played a recurring role in Western civilization from the ancient Greeks to the Italian Renaissance to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in the early 20th century. The first gay periodical, Der Eigene, was launched by anarchist pederasts in 1896.
The inclusion of “B” in the alphabet soup seems superfluous because most gay men and lesbians have had other-sex experiences, and nobody argues that bisexuals are oppressed for the heterosexual part of their lifestyle. The only apparent connection between the “T” and the other letters, which are about sexual attraction rather than gender, is a shared opposition to discrimination.
Identity versus Behavior
The underlying assumption of “LGBTQ” is one that rejects fluidity and ambiguity in favor of fixed identities. This flies in the face of everything known about human (and primate) sexual behavior, as well as the lived experience of most gay men and lesbians. Cross-cultural studies show that same-sex behavior exists in all societies and can range from occasional to exclusive—as Alfred Kinsey’s studies also showed—and becomes more prevalent the higher up the phylogenetic scale one goes. “LGBTQ” rejects behavior—what one does—in favor of a label corresponding to a fixed definition of self.
The addition of “queer” is apparently meant to get around this obstacle. But the word itself is problematic and carries unpleasant baggage. It allegedly describes anyone who falls outside the boundaries of heteronormativity. But “queer” has historically applied mostly to gay males and has long been considered a deadly insult, conveying a threat of violent assault. The Village Voice noted that it was the only word that U.S. commanders in Vietnam could rely on to prod reluctant GIs to fight. Being called “queer” can still strike terror in most males.
Those who promote this epithet argue that they are “reclaiming” it (which implies that we “claimed” it in the past), thereby stripping the word of its terrorist power. When Huffington Post changed the name of its regular feature from “Gay Voices” to “Queer Voices” (February 2016), its editor, Noah Michelson, offered a more pragmatic explanation: the need for a catchall term to include a large number of disparate groups: “‘Queer’ functions as an umbrella term that includes not only the lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people of ‘LGBT,’ but also those whose identities fall in between, outside of or stretch beyond those categories, including genderqueer people, intersex people, asexual people, pansexual people, polyamorous people and those questioning their sexuality or gender, to name just a few.”
The first gay group to emblazon “queer” on its banner was Queer Nation. At New York’s gay pride rally in Union Square on June 23, 1990, it distributed a large brochure titled “Queers Read This!” (“published anonymously by queers”) in which it asked, “Why Queer?”: “Well, yes, ‘gay’ is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we’ve chosen to call ourselves queer. Using ‘queer’ is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It’s a way of telling ourselves we don’t have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world.”
An opposite viewpoint is offered by novelist John Rechy on his website, where he points to the absurdity of using a slur as the subject of academic studies, and of its widespread adoption in everyday parlance:
Now comes the odious word “queer,” eagerly seized by dippy academics and converted into yet another undecipherable “theory.” The rationale? Defuse the word “queer” of its ugly meaning, arrogate it and convert it. Oh? How about proposing “dyke theory,” “kike theory,” “nigger theory,” “spik [sic]theory,” “dago theory,” “fag theory,” “cunt theory”? Would that defuse those hateful names, strip them of their dangerous power? How, then does “queer,” the language of gay-bashers, purge the devastating meaning?
The Politics of LGBT
Gay liberation wasn’t the only rebellion of the 1960s counterculture to fade into a pale version of its former self. That happened to all movements. Some movements, like the Black Power movement of the Black Panthers and other organizations, were violently attacked by the state. Others, like the women’s movement and gay and lesbian liberation, were essentially co-opted once they achieved some of their goals. The gay and lesbian movement faced a special challenge when AIDS killed off many gay activists. Gay pride marches became corporatized folkloric displays and capitalist advertising venues. Feminism veered off into anti-male campaigns demonizing porn, prostitution, public sex, pederasty—the four evil “P’s.” The Left sank into irrelevancy following its heyday during the anti-Vietnam War movement. Labor union membership dwindled from around twenty percent in 1983 to eleven percent today. Of all the movements of the 1960s and ’70s, only the environmental movement shows signs of life.
The ascendancy of “LGBTQ” represents a number of things:
• Sex has been demoted. Sexual freedom was replaced by the goal of formal legal equality regardless of sexual or gender orientation.
• The struggle for social justice has been replaced by a parochial focus on “identity.”
• It has become an interest group like any other minority, an electoral constituency oriented mostly toward the Democratic Party.
The morphing of gay liberation into LGBTQ+ reflects at once a growing social acceptance of non-heterosexual lifestyles and a retreat from a struggle to liberate repressed human sexuality in favor of accommodation with the hetero-capitalist status quo. It downplays issues of social justice in favor of equal rights for minority identities that are acceptable to the dominant society. It has proved itself politically expedient in eking out a few legal victories, but it has come at the price of choosing conventionality and conformism over ambiguity and individualism.
David Thorstad was president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance in the mid-1970s and is the coauthor (with John Lauritsen) ofThe Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935).
