The organizers of this talk asked me to explore the overview of the gay rights movement, specifically — That's a mighty task, indeed. I mean, there's just so much one can do. I ran this task past a few historians who focus on gay rights and LGBTQ history in the United States, and we came to a realization that a do-able approach would be one that explores the following question: how has gender and sexual non-conformity been critical to renegotiating concepts of belonging or citizenship in the modern US? The broad scope that we discussed reveals the changed landscape for the field of gender and sexuality and its relationship to the field of modern American history. There has been a florescence of study on this topic in recent decades. The AIDS crisis, emerging in the 1980s, and its particularly visible effect on gay communities — members of which, along with people of color, made up the majority of people living with HIV — stimulated significant intellectual engagement with the history of LGBTQ rights. Indeed, when we consider the way that the rise of study in the LGBTQ experience in America has reshaped our notions of national narratives, it’s important to see how this mode of inquiry moves to citizenship and how that process complicates the chronology of political change from New Deal to Reagan, as well as revealing the gender, class and racial cross currents in rights politics, is a discussion that works in a short presentation, I think.
In one way, this becomes clearer by another imperative: I’d also like to think about how the study of gay communities and their history in America has grown increasingly inclusive with the larger American experience, and thus the way that this study has influenced our thinking about the United States more broadly and the evolution of liberalism. The exploration of gay history has included many important themes, including these individuals’ and communities’ interactions with the state, state violence, medicine and public health, media representation, and the larger political, social, and cultural battles over recognition in the nation’s past — inquiries stimulated and shaped by the failures of public health and political discourse to address the AIDS epidemic unfolding in the nation in the 1980s.
As historian Julio Capo, Jr., of the University of Massachusetts recently stated in a Journal of American History roundtable on the subject, “The HIV/AIDS crisis exposed the necessity—as people were fighting literally for their survival—for new research and understanding for sexual and gender nonconformists, along with other marginalized groups who came under increasingly aggressive attack in the 1980s and 1990s. In this way, and especially learning from feminist scholars, the historical scholarship on HIV/AIDS was also an extension of political activism and work.”
To reiterate, in this field of historical inquiry, the boundaries between scholarship —objective on its face and meticulous in its research—and activism are blurred. Moreover, they reveal the myth that our scholarship has few connections to our lives, or to the history of the nation more generally.
Beginning in the 1960s, as social movements funneled energy into social history, studying the “people,” broadly conceived, increased as an area of study. By the 1970s, programs and departments — often interdisciplinary in nature — sprung up around the country. Scholars in the fields of women studies, African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, and more sought to bring the voices of the dispossessed, the marginalized, and the forgotten into focus.
One result of this tendency has been, in popular perception, to further marginalize, or to create a field of “white” history — otherwise known as the “official history” of political history — and everyone else outside of that narrative. But, in fact, the reverse is the case. Instead, the study of these lost histories is intended to tell the complete story of the nation’s history, not to further bifurcate it, separate, and marginalize. This result is fruitful: by reconstructing the place of different gender experiences, sexualities, and cultures, historians have created a more complete and accurate set of narratives and questions about the evolution of the American state, society, and politics.
As recent trends in the study of the AIDS epidemic reveal, histories of the American state have been influenced by this recent scholarship. Jonathan Bell’s work on the AIDS crisis and health care system has demonstrated how state governments created policy to confront lack of access to health care (mini-COBRA laws that extended or enlarged the 1985 federal law allowing HIV-positive people to keep their health insurance for a period after leaving employment). This contribution is already modifying important narratives that have grown from the study of sexuality and the gay rights movement in the United States, but also ways that we think about the evolution of the modern American health care system and policy.
Looking to the influence of this scholarship on our understanding of these themes in American poltiical, social, and cultural history, many recent contributions stand out. Three short examples to illustrate how understanding the gay rights struggle, its various phases, strategies, and understanding by historians can deepen, complicate, and enrich our larger understanding of American history.
The Great Depression as a crisis of gender/sex as well as economic. Historian George Chauncey argues that the end of Prohibition, rather than being the end of a morally repressive state intervention, spelled the end for a more open, epxressive, and tolerant gay prewar world, and became embroiled among the “disruption of gender arrangements by the Depression. As the onset of the Depression dashed the confidence of the 1920s, gay men and lesbians began to seem less amusing than dangerous." (331) Able to move freely and be expressive within illegal prohibition drinking establishments, combined with the gender crisis of the economic depression, when drinking establishments are relegitimized, "a powerful campaign to render gay men and lesbians invisible — to exclude them from the public sphere — quickly gained momentum." (331) (One ironic consequence of this growing anti-gay regulation movement, Chauncey notes, was "the creation of exclusively gay bars." (348) — the kinds of bars run by the mafia, of which Stonewall would be one.) But in the context of the Great Depression, Chauncy argues, "The reaction against the challenges posed to manhood by Depression conditions was widely evident in the culture, from the celebration of powerful male physiques in the public art of the New Deal to the attacks on married women for 'stealing' men's jobs and the laws passed by several states requiring women to be dismissed from teaching jobs when they married. Lesbians and gay men began to seem more dangerous in this context — as figures whose defiant perversity threatened to undermine the reproduction of normative gender and sexual arrangements already threatened by the upheavals of the thirties." (354)”
The development of the modern bureaucratic state, growing out of the Great Depression and World War II, are also enhanced by a wider focus on gender and sexuality. Indeed, the rise of what Margot Canaday refers to as the “stragith state” connects statecraft to the policing and definition of categories of gender and sexuality. Indeed, the entire idea of the closet and the frameworks that were the subject of the gay rights movement, the subject of this exhibit, could be considered, as Canaday argues, a “deliberate state strategy,” a tool used to circumscribe sexual minorities and legitimize the heterosexual nuclear family as the fundamental productive unit of society and of citizenship. Canaday connects this strategy to specific policy, namely the GI Bill and the development of the welfare state. The GI Bill, by promoting the education of male breadwinners, putting them to work in college, or providing them with affordable home loans had the goal of getting young men, unlike following the Great War (think Gatsby) from wandering around, unmarried, moorless. Rather, the GI Bill actively promoted family life, and in particular families of a man, woman, married and housed in a single-family dwelling.
The Cold War and McCarthyism as not just about nuclear fears and hysteria, but about the elevation of the American nuclear family and extension of idea of subversion to private areas. David K. Johnson, in his book the Lavender Scare, which refers to the repeated use by Senator Everett Dirksen of the term “lavender laddies” in the midst of the Red Scare. Similar to Chauncy’s work, Johnson unearths a “vibrant gay subculture” in 1930s Washington that became the subject of extreme scrutiny in the postwar years, when thousands of Americans were interrogated in secluded rooms about their sex lives. Why? Because in the context of the Red Scare, not only was the heterosexual family seen as the unit of American citizenship but also as an ideological symbol in the Cold War. Not only was upholding the image and reality of the family, based on heterosexual normativity, important, but the concept of deviance became even more enforced and proscribed, making the closet a necessity, in a climate that made homosexuality synonymous with subversive. The overt logic went like this: homosexuals, because of the lack of social acceptability of their sexual preference, were thus subject to blackmail, and thus automatically a security risk. This atmosphere helps to explain why the 1950s movement, represented by groups like the Mattachine Society, pursued a project of “respectability”. Yet the purging of innocent Americans also helped spark a shift in the gay rights movement. The lavender scare, along with Chauncy’s work on Gay New York, highlights not only how homosexuality has been a consistent political issue, not only a project emerging since Stonewall.
III. As such, including the gay rights movement within the larger Chronology of civil rights movement revises several aspects of this larger history and the way that historians think about this movement and the lives of LGBTQ people as part of American history more broadly.
In the history of the gay rights movement, national narratives have tended to overshadow local activism and politics. “Controversies over gay visibility in the media, conflicts over the regulation of urban vice, and the political cooptation of pornography” have been explored by those interested in sexual politics with the goal of understanding the transformation of American liberalism in the post World War II era.
The LGBTQ cause did advance during the 1970s amidst the conservative turn, with new expressions of community pride, the development of national organizations, and protective laws. What we see emerge is a changing of the terms of the debate between gay and lesbian activists and religious and racial conservatives — who challenged not only legal rights and recognition, but gays and lesbians claims to “legitimacy as a minority.” As such, exploring the idea of a rights movement must also take into consideration the way that activists reconstructed their very identities within the body politic as they negotiated the claims to rights and working from the liberal mindset from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Indeed, the study of the gay rights movement, and gay and lesbian studies more generally, which has emerged from this project, involves questions about identity construction and its evolution within historical contexts. As one historian explains, “Perhaps more than any other field, gay and lesbian studies concentrates on the origins and meanings of identity, creating discussions that often evolve into what is referred to as the essentialism versus constructionism debate. Essentialist scholars conceive of sexuality as a transhistorical essence located in the self, and they tend to see the gays, lesbians, or homosexuals of the past as identifying and desiring in much the same way as they do in the present.”
But historians tend to operate from a constructionist point of view, that see sexual categories — homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality, and gender constructs more generally — as historically constructed, responding to changing structures and cultural shifts, not limited to changes within capitalism, family structures, demographics, and scientific inquiry. Across the moments and categories of this exhibit, as we see, put o and following the Stonewall riots in 1969, gay and lesbian identity underwent significant transformation and assumed new articulation in various spaces, in the case of Stonewall, the space of urban America.
These identities were formed in communities, within specific spaces, but also through contact with other communities and culture: through literature, magazines, visual culture — or through interactions with the power of government, through regulation and policy aimed at the family through the welfare state — Canaday’s “straight state”, or through more subjective self-representation within cultural production on the part of racial and sexual minorities.
Indeed, more recently, the idea of intersectionality has demonstrated the way that racial and sexual modes interacted with economic inequality, educational reform, and municipal projects and local activism. LGBTQ activists continually interacted with, were influenced by, and even clashed with black activists and gay people of color for purchase within what might be termed the broader rights revolution—a historical frame that extends back to post-emancipation, in what historians have come to think of as the “long civil rights movement” but also the expansion of that movement to include gender and other racial minorities, as well as sexual minorities. It is in this area that more scholarship continues to emerge, exploring the connections and sometimes conflicts among these advocacy groups.
For example, Historians of the legal regulation of sexuality have focused more on the issues of marriage and sodomy than on antidiscrimination legislation, while the recent growth of historiography on the northern civil rights movement largely overlooks gays and lesbians.
This wider focus of historians also reflects the multidimensional aspects of the gay rights movement — which we could see having gained new assertive identity and become nationally recognizable by the 1970s. It focused widely on gaining media representation and visibility, developed legal goals such as decriminalizing sodomy and declassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder.
This activist culture took shape within a larger culture of rights-based politics determined by anti-racist activism and activists, yielding an activist culture that had “admiration for and clash[ed] with the black power movement,” and should be considered within a larger contexts of black activism, just as the experience of sexual minorities must be incorporated into the larger history of the United States.
Thus this field of inquiry continues to address new questions within the larger field of American history and politics, but also considering the development of gay communities and identities in a transnational lens. Earlier this summer, Julio Capo’s book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940, explored the gay community in Miami, exploring this “transnational queer history of a city just “south of the U.S. South.”” As he explains, “It highlights how transnational forces—including (im)migration, trade, and tourism—to and from the Caribbean shaped Miami’s queer past.”