Women are marrying women, men are marrying men; many of either persuasion are, with beatific smiles, pushing baby carriages. One’s sister, daughter, wife, mother, brother, son, husband, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, colleagues, friends, and neighbors are not just tiptoeing out of the closet but publicly claiming their gayness in all spheres of life. It is, to be sure, a cultural sea change, and one that seems to have happened overnight, at least from the perspective of mainstream America. Who would have imagined such a state of affairs? Certainly not the early gay and lesbian activists of the Stonewall era, those who have now reached a certain age, the folks, along with those who have passed on, who were at the barricades of the early gay liberation movement, years before the alphabet soup of lgbtq rights. Indeed the shift from “liberation” to “rights,” which was a slow morphing over the years, is itself emblematic of what has changed.
Assimilation into the social mainstream has moved steadily apace, and with it have come complications that face all minorities: co-optation, tokenism, paternalism, and a veneer of tolerance. What happened to re-imagining and re-inventing social institutions such as marriage and family, hallmarks of early activist groups? It’s astonishing to rediscover the mission statement of New York City’s Gay Liberation Front, formed in 1969 following the Stonewall Riots, which included the following self-declaration: “We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.” Can we possibly imagine today’s dominant lgbtq rights organizations describing themselves as “revolutionary” and calling for universal “sexual liberation”?
Gay and lesbian folks who aren’t old enough to remember either the bad old days or the early days of gay and lesbian liberation—a growing majority at this time—may be overjoyed that they can partake of the fruits of acceptance (however incomplete) into mainstream society. Most are probably oblivious to the vision of meaningful social change that animated the early activists. Let me consider a few of the major areas in which things have undoubtedly changed, but not quite in the ways that were hoped for when the early movement began.
Gay Marriage. I turn first to an interview with the cult filmmaker John Waters and his much quoted line, “I always thought the privilege of being gay is that we don’t have to get married or go into the army.” And later in this New Yorker interview (March 26, 2007) he proclaimed that marriage, an entrenched heterosexual tradition, was a corny and expensive tradition. Of course gay or lesbian marriages can be more than corny and expensive. Just ask the smart, feisty, hot, cute, charming 83-year-old woman, Edie Windsor (straight out of central casting), who put the Supreme Court’s feet to the fire in 2013 to strike down a monumentally unfair law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus paving the way for state after state, a veritable domino effect (with attendant backlash), to proclaim gay or lesbian marriage to be okay.
But I wonder, in a country still awash in racism and classism, would an overweight, impoverished woman of color who is lesbian have been as acceptable a plaintiff as was this attractive, wealthy, former IBM executive with a house in the Hamptons? (Full disclosure: Edie is a friend of mine, a kind, loving woman who gives the best hugs around.) One can easily imagine the decision going the other way, which would have been disastrous for lesbians and gay men everywhere. Edie Windsor’s undertaking was just plain brave and heroic, and she deserves all the accolades she has garnered. But where in this important scenario is the original vision of the gay, lesbian, and feminist liberation movements, which included a radical agenda of progressive society-wide change, such as a rethinking of the whole institution of marriage, a longing to experiment with a more open-ended, flexible, and varied model for intimate human relationships? As things now stand, one is reminded of the quips by late-night TV hosts when the subject of gay marriage was first in the air: “Sure, I’m all for gay marriage. Why shouldn’t they be as miserable as the rest of us?”
The Military. In 2012 on a military base in Hawaii at a family return-from-duty homecoming celebration, a buff gay Marine—as of September 2011 no longer needing not to tell—planted a passionate kiss and a wildly loving hug onto his boyfriend that in minutes went viral on social media sites. One thinks of Judy Grahn, the lesbian poet and activist who in the early 1960s was kicked out of the Air Force for being a lesbian. Or Lenny Matlovich, the highly decorated Vietnam veteran, also kicked out of the military, who became a gay liberation activist and whose tombstone, carved upon his death in 1988, memorably reads: “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” At the same time, as this quotation poignantly reminds us, the military is a very conservative institution, in times of war a “killing machine,” participation in which should be problematical for anyone who questions the legitimacy of war in general and recent American adventures in particular.
Psychiatry. The most recent American attempt to “cure” homosexuals—after thousands of gay men in the U.S. and the U.K. underwent torturous episodes, as documented by historian Martin Duberman in his 1991 book Cures and in the recent movie about mathematician Alan Turing, The Imitation Game—is the “ex-gay” movement, which emerged a generation ago and which continues to this day, although with distinct signs of faltering. In 2012, an influential psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Spitzer, who had claimed in a 2003 study that gay individuals could be “cured” through a method called reparative therapy, admitted that the study, which religious fundamentalists had pounced upon to establish “cure” clinics across the country, was “fatally flawed”; and he apologized for promulgating it. And he went on to say, “I believe I owe the gay community an apology,” a miraculous statement considering the years of psychiatric damage caused by many, not all, but very many of his colleagues. Not long after Spitzer’s apology, a World Health Organization report called his reparative therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being—even the lives—of affected people.” So here’s a case of “assimilation”—into the realm of “normal” psychology—that seems to me an unmixed blessing.
As an aside: the headline in a New York Times article about Spitzer’s apology (May 18, 2012) read: “Psychiatry Giant Sorry for Backing Gay Cure.” To see such a headline in the Times attests to a revolution in the Times’ treatment of gays and lesbians over the past many years. It wasn’t until 1987, when the powerful—some say tyrannical—heterosexist executive editor Abe Rosenthal left his post at the paper, that things began to change. Before that, even the word “gay” was banned in favor of the more clinical and subtly pejorative “homosexual”; but since then the Times has come to be a reliable and powerful booster for all things gay and lesbian, both in the political and the cultural realms.*
Books. These days, bookstore shelves are groaning with gay- and lesbian-themed books of every description: academic studies, literary and not-so-literary novels, poetry chapbooks, mysteries, memoirs—some of them receiving substantial critical attention (not to mention favorable reviews). This is a far cry from 1973 when a group of Philadelphia activists rented a storefront on the city’s South Street to establish a gay and lesbian community gathering place in the hope of including a gay and lesbian bookstore. They named that enterprise Giovanni’s Room after the James Baldwin novel and displayed what positive written words were then available, which filled only one shelf of one short bookcase. However, over the years the bookstore came to thrive, not always financially but as a center of discussion and activism. In 2014, after 41 years as the nucleus of the city’s gay and lesbian community, following the fate of many other independent bookstores, Giovanni’s Room closed its doors. Rolling Stone magazine, in its May 21, 2014 issue, saluted the store and its longtime activist-owner Ed Hermance. When asked about the store’s beginnings and its longevity, Hermance said, “We were working on changing the world. That was our motivation.” Such was the dream when this and every other gay and lesbian bookstore came into being; surely their disappearance is an important, and not an altogether happy, development in our cultural history.
The Academy. Moving to the world of academia, one couldn’t have imagined a faculty position dedicated to gay and lesbian studies, but in 2009 Harvard University endowed a chair for GLBT studies (the F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality). But Yale trumped Harvard this time, having failed to endow a similar chair in 1997 but succeeding in 2001. Today, according to College Equality Index, an organization that assists the college search process for prospective LGBT students, there are some forty institutions that offer a minor in queer studies. These victories represent a struggle that started in the 1970s, when graduate students first began to propose topics on gay and lesbian issues in literature and in the social sciences. Even sympathetic faculty members, wary of tenure decisions in their future, would almost always turn their backs on such research. Today scholars are making up for lost time as doctoral candidates are turning out great numbers of dissertations and books on gay and lesbian topics.
Assimilation into a dominant mainstream has always been a thorny issue for minority groups seeking acceptance. It would be cranky to begrudge the millions of gay men and lesbians who have joyfully embraced mainstream values and norms, even at the cost of jettisoning aspects of their lives that don’t fit the mold. But there are still many people who question these values and norms, including those who continue to be on the side of re-envisioning more progressive societal constructs by acting to change the status quo, and those who concur with what James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (with reference to racism): “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”
So, far be it from me or anyone else of a certain age to resent those who are now enjoying the fruits of gay liberation in the form of acceptance into mainstream social institutions. At the same time, these folks should be aware of the inevitable backlash against these gains—anti-gay legislation is afoot in many states as I write—and be prepared to fight back against powerful individuals and groups that seek to destroy what has been gained.
* In 1974, according to my literary agent at the time, Rosenthal killed a “rave” review by Times staffer Judy Klemesrud of my book Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism. Probable reason: not fit to print. It gave me some solace back then to see that a Boston Evening Globe editor was not so squeamish, running a “rave” review by Loretta Lotman in the July 14, 1974 issue.
Dolores Klaich is writing a memoir of the early days of the gay and lesbian liberation movement.
Discussion2 Comments
Some people believe we need more poster children and less revolution, in a way to me that may be correct, we need more art work, more holding hands, more kissing, more TV , more movies more visibility and more capitalist gain in the LGBT movement and finally, more spiritual growth and healing, and more therapy. Not until Homosexuality is thought of as completely normal will we truly experience the sought after pride. It is not up to Congress or Academics to grant us freedom, we must unravel it from a never ending form of self expression of how we view same sex affection and attraction, it must be in all of our stories and not just taken account of
Enough already with the bitching and moaning from all of these so-called radicals who, having spent the last few decades attacking mainstream gay activism rather than actually working for real change, are now claiming that we were too effective and they would prefer other political goals that virtually no one besides them share. I don’t consider that to be radical and certainly not democratic or populist – it is actually an incredibly elitist and condescending form of politics that assumes the “queer” masses are suffering from false consciousness and should defer to the judgements of their “radical” betters.