Has the Gay Movement Failed?
by Martin Duberman
Univ. of California Press
246 pages, $27.95
WHEN A WRITER puts a question mark at the end of a title, the answer is usually obvious. Martin Duberman believes the gay movement has failed, or at best has settled for victories unworthy of its potential. Those victories include gay marriage and the right to serve in the military. In the four chapters of this book, both a history and critique of the gay movement since Stonewall, Duberman argues that gaining equal admission to mainstream American society, which became the goal of the gay movement after a brief early period of radical activism, was more a capitulation than a victory. Duberman’s book provokes another question: could gay leaders have been more courageous in their choices?
Grounding his books in facts about the past, Duberman seeks to understand historical patterns that have emerged over time. The first chapter is a history of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group formed in New York City in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Given his dissatisfaction with the assimilationist agenda of the currently dominant national gay organizations, Duberman returns to the source documents of the GLF, its manifestos and newsletters, to present a contrasting gay liberation agenda that sought to transform society.
True to the spirit of the ’60s and ’70s, the GLF challenged sexual, racial, and gender oppression and called for an end to war and economic inequality. For Duberman, this vision becomes the gold standard for the gay movement, despite the fact that the GLF never had more than a few hundred members, lacked a central organization, quickly splintered into fractions, and disbanded after a mere three years. The GLF also sowed the seeds of the anti-religion, anti-nuclear family, anti-marriage, and anti-monogamy positions that were adopted by the radical gay Left but not shared by most LGBT people.
Marriage, and to a lesser extent military service, continue to trouble Duberman throughout the book. The second chapter, “Love, Work, Sex,” contains a grab bag of topics, including labor unions and age-of-consent laws, but is primarily about the gay movement’s embrace of the model of traditional heterosexual marriage. This opposition is grounded in his belief that gay people have unique contributions to make to society as a whole, that they are not just like everyone else except for what they do in bed. These contributions include an openness to many forms of gender identity, an embrace of sexual innovation and mutuality in intimate relationships, and an expansive concept of family.
Duberman, who is married, acknowledges that in contemporary American society marriage provides specific legal and economic benefits, but he believes that these benefits should be available to everyone. He regrets that the gay movement did not attempt to redefine marriage accordingly. Placing a high value on sexual pleasure, Duberman’s redefinition rejects the two-person monogamous unit and allows for many versions of blended households. This is reasonable, and probably in keeping with what many people, gay and straight, actually do in relationships today. Still, Duberman risks offending some readers when he writes derisively about married couples who remain faithful to each other into their eighties or when he dismisses the issue of childrearing by pointing out that not everyone is fond of children.
Given the success of the marriage equality movement, Duberman’s reservations will not convince many readers that the outcome was anything short of a victory. On the other hand, he is convincing in a chapter titled “Equality or Liberation?” about the failure of the Human Rights Campaign and the National lgbtq Task Force to address the needs of gay people who are not white, straight-appearing, and middle-class. Essentially, these organizations made a bargain with liberal Americans: give us equal rights and we’ll agree to embrace mainstream social and cultural values. Left out of the bargain are blacks, marginalized women, trans people, effeminate gays, and working-class gay people.
As Duberman reminds us, Americans are currently experiencing a backlash in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. Anti-gay violence has increased, as has the suicide rate among gay teens. Lawmakers are turning to “defense of religion” arguments to curtail gay protections. National gay organizations, Duberman believes, are ill-equipped to address these problems because their leadership is hierarchical and isolated from local communities, too corporate friendly, and too concerned about presenting a media-savvy image to the public. In the second half of this chapter, Duberman’s concern about these organizational failures morphs into lengthy discussions of theories about the causes of homosexuality, the workings of the brain, and the nature of bisexuality. All this can be a bit overwhelming. In the end, he admits that clarity on these topics is impossible because the “experts” contradict each other. Better editing might have removed some of this material.
In his final chapter, “Whose Left?,” Duberman makes it clear that at heart his argument is with the values of American society: consumerism, militarism, the nuclear family, and male domination. Once the gay movement ceased to offer an alternative to these values, the path to gay marriage and military service was inevitable. In searching for a way forward that would right this course and address social justice issues, Duberman first considers the possibility of a political alliance between the radical straight Left and the gay Left. He concludes, however, that the former is not interested in gender and sexuality issues, perhaps because of ingrained homophobia, while the latter, under the tepid leadership of its national organizations, appears to care only about rights associated with traditional, privileged families.
The best opportunity for broadening the focus of the mainstream gay movement, Duberman believes, lies with emergent radical gay local organizations willing to address the economic, racial, and gender issues that the middle-class gay majority ignores. Such small, local organizations are reminiscent of Duberman’s touchstone, the GLF. He also cites studies that document a shift in “personality traits” of the generation of gay men now “arriving” from the one “exiting.” A number of young gay men reject the domineering masculinity of the past and cultivate their ability to empathize with the needs of others. The transformation of society Duberman longs for may yet be in the making.
In Has the Gay Movement Failed?, Duberman pulls no punches in challenging the values of what he considers America’s unjust society and the shortsightedness of the mainstream gay movement in seeking equal admission into that society. Even readers who do not share this sweeping condemnation will come away from this book with an expanded understanding of what being gay in America means.
Daniel A Burr, who lives in Covington, Kentucky, is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
