Social Movements series

Colin J. Beck, Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Terrorists
Stephanie Luce, Labor Movements: Global Perspectives
Lisa M. Stulberg, LGBTQ Social Movements
David Walls, Community Organizing: Fanning the Flame of Democracy

I love that feeling just before I start to read a new book. I take it all in before I even read a word: the cover design, the feel of the paper, the typeface, the Table of Contents. No matter where I am or how quickly I have to digest a book, whether I’m reading fiction or nonfiction, for pleasure or for work, I am immediately calmed when I read. Put a book in my hand on a crowded subway and I’m good. Everything just melts away, and it’s just me and the pages. And starting a new book is especially exciting. I just know I’m about to start feeling something, or learning something, falling in love with some quirky and flawed character, writing furiously in the margins, staying up way too late reading by the light of my phone.

And it all starts with the Acknowledgments for me. Acknowledgments are the first thing I read when I start any book. I said this once in a class, and I got a much more surprised reaction from my students than I would have expected. It doesn’t seem that weird to me, but I guess it is. For me, Acknowledgments are a window into the personality and the relationships of the author. They are usually written in a different voice from the text itself, and I love hearing how the author’s voice sounds when they’re not working so hard to be artful or articulate. I feel like I’m learning something about the way they rely on people, who they have in their lives, their sense of humor and humility and gratitude.

Anyway, all that is to say that these Acknowledgments sections are very important to me, and I want to make sure I don’t forget anyone. I apologize in advance to those I have inevitably left out here.

First, thank you to the amazing staff at Polity. Emma Longstaff initially expressed interest in this book and was my first editor at the press. Her enthusiasm and support were incredibly motivating and appreciated, and I will always be grateful to her. Jonathan Skerrett has been a wonderful editor of the project – always so accessible and insightful. My copyeditor, Sarah Dancy, had great attention to detail and the amazing ability to put up with me and all of my anxious notes. Thanks too to Geraldine Beare for compiling the index. The team at Polity – including Amy Williams, Adrienn Jelinek, Neil de Cort, and Rachel Moore – has been a pleasure to work with. I have to say, I got the most helpful and thorough reviews of the initial manuscript of any I’ve ever received on any project. Thanks so much to these three anonymous reviewers for their feedback - the book is immeasurably stronger because of it – and to the Polity team for soliciting these wonderful reviews.

Claudia Castañeda, editor extraordinaire, read the entire manuscript draft twice and was exceedingly patient and responsive to all of my questions and concerns. I can’t imagine having written this without her feedback and input. Of course, all of the book’s shortcomings are my own.

This project began because I wanted to write the kind of book that I could use in the kinds of classes I teach at New York University. At NYU, I have had incredible friends, colleagues, and students who have supported me and the book in so many ways over the years. The Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities has been by home at NYU for 15 years, and I am so grateful for it. The NYU Steinhardt PhD students who have been especially supportive of this project include Bryan Rosenberg, Nina Mauceri, Hilary Lustick, Maggie Fay, and Sarah Klevan. Undergrads in my spring 2016 and spring 2017 Social Movements classes read and engaged with earlier drafts of the book in ways that were incredibly helpful to me along the way. Thanks, especially, to Besjana Hoxha, Marcha Johnson, Samantha Padavick, and Jordan Reynolds, for being willing to read and give feedback on draft chapters. The NYU LGBTQ working group - an amazing group of faculty, students, and staff – gave me a close read, valuable time, a supportive community, and incisive feedback along the way. Sebastian Cherng provided a crucial cover suggestion at a critical moment. Joe Salvatore has taught me so much over the years and has always been a willing, supportive, and caring listener, colleague, and friend – and also great with cover design feedback!

Then there are those friends who just always ask, in exactly the right way, how my writing is going, and they are always there to celebrate accomplishments, to weigh in on small decisions, and to lend encouragement and fun diversion when exhaustion sets in. For this project, those friends and family members especially include Ian Stulberg and Bob Berman, Lauri Hornik, Tony Chen, John and Melissa King, Cori Flam Meltzer and Brad Meltzer, and members of “the fam” text group who always have grammar advice and cute Bitmojis to share at any time of the day or night. And, while I cannot thank him directly, the late Eric Rofes has frequent conversations with me about this book, even if he doesn’t know it. I am regularly inspired by the example he set of how to live life, do politics, write, and teach.

Thanks go, too, to my local coffee shop – you know who you are – for allowing me to sit there for hours with my wall of books, nursing my extra large decaf iced coffee with extra ice. Thanks, too, to our miniature poodle, Gryffindor (Griffy) for keeping my feet warm while I wrote and for never minding when I needed to take walks or runs with her while my head was in this book. And to the late George Michael, thanks for getting me through a last, intense week of writing the first draft of this book, especially the song “Freedom,” which I played basically incessantly. I like to think that the lyrics “sometimes the clothes do not make the man” are not just a commentary about fame but are also, in the context of this project, a comment on the complexities of gender.

Finally, to my amazing, incredible family – the East Coast and Midwest contingents – I love who you are and I love who you allow me to be. Any sentence that I’ve started and deleted over and over here does not do justice to just how much you mean to me and how much purpose you give my life. To all of the young people in my immediate and extended family and the young people whom our kids have brought into our lives: I am in awe of how brave, generous, social justice-minded, and loving you are, and I can’t wait for you to write the next chapter of this ongoing story of social change.

“I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” I have carried these words with me since the moment I read them in college. They belong to Audre Lorde, an incredible African American lesbian activist and writer, and she wrote them after she had been diagnosed with cancer, when she was facing her own mortality. She continued:

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us … [I]t is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken. (1984, pp. 41, 44)

I read this on the last day of my undergraduate social movements class each spring. Silence is debilitating. Silence is dangerous. “And there are so many silences to be broken.” This is the same sentiment that moved AIDS activists in the 1980s. They proclaimed that “Silence = Death,” and they mobilized around being as loud as possible for their cause and their survival.

This is a book about people who have broken past their silences. The book is meant for students and others who are new to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) social movement history and politics. I have taught an American social movements class to undergraduates at New York University a number of times since the early 2000s. I have found that students had learned almost nothing about LGBTQ history and activism in high school or in their other college courses and that they are eager for and incredibly receptive to this material. They have a strong and quite visceral reaction to the history and present-day injustices faced by LGBTQ Americans and the ways in which they and their allies have fought back. In the few years in which these young students have been politically conscious or active, they have experienced the national debate on same-sex marriage, and they want to grasp why marriage is such a hot-button issue. They have watched as states have debated so-called “bathrooms bills,” and they want to know why providing equal access to transgender people is so controversial. They debate LGBTQ politics with their families, and they are excited to use their new knowledge at the holiday dinner table. They are LGBTQ themselves or have queer friends and family members and want to understand their rights and the challenges they face and are likely to face as they plan to enter the workforce or start families. They want to mobilize for LGBTQ justice, and they want to learn from previous generations of activists.

I attempt to tell a story of more than 70 years in a short, accessible way, and that has felt nearly impossible. LGBTQ social movements in the United States, like any other movement, contain so many different approaches to social change within them and are characterized by both diversity and inevitable internal conflict (Ghaziani, 2008). I cannot possibly do justice to this varied, complicated, and dynamic set of movements and movement actors in a short, introductory book. But the story I tell here is one about the mainstream LGBTQ movements since World War II in the US.¹ I have chosen to include here those events, organizations, and people that help raise key themes that I believe are central to understanding the politics of gender and sexuality of the past few generations.

This book is a starting point for those who want to know just a little bit, so they can contextualize the current politics of gender and sexuality in the US, or who want to know much more but need a foundation and a set of resources to explore further. I hope this is a good first stop. I hope this book will prompt you to learn more, to flip through the bibliography to find those resources that resonate with you, and to pay attention to the current politics of LGBTQ social change (maybe having picked up here a bit more knowledge to guide your understanding). Pairing this book with a look at the primary historical and political documents of these movements (some of which are cited here) is another wonderful way to further explore the themes and events that are introduced here.

This is a story about marginalized people and communities using a wide range of political and cultural tools at their disposal to make demands on the state – their government – to fight for full citizenship and to realize their full humanity in a country that often thinks of them as less than fully human, less than fully deserving of basic rights and freedoms. The unifying idea of this book is that LGBTQ social movements, like most others by oppressed peoples in the US, have always been about marginalized groups’ relationships to their country and its institutions. They interact with history in dynamic, complex ways on multiple fronts. Ultimately, they raise central questions about the mechanisms of change and the limits and possibilities of democracy.

We see this in a few key ideas that I highlight in my discussion in these chapters: in the way that marginalized communities and their activists work to either assimilate into existing cultures and institutions or lose faith in these cultures and institutions and remove themselves from them, building alternatives instead; the way they view the law as both a vehicle for and a constraint on social change; and the way they use many tools at their disposal to not just change law but to change hearts and minds. The themes that structure this book’s discussion of LGBTQ social movements in the US are: (1) assimilationism and liberationism as complex sets of strategies for equality and social justice; (2) the limits and possibilities of law and policy; (3) the role of art and popular culture in social change; (4) the interconnectedness of social movements; and (5) the role of privilege in movement organizing.

In LGBTQ movements, participants and analysts have often understood the ways in which activists orient themselves toward the state to be either assimilationist or liberationist. Sociologist Steven Seidman argues of this distinction: “At the heart of this political division are contrasting images of America” and its potential (2002, p. 183). The distinction is both strategic and philosophical. As political scientist Craig A. Rimmerman writes, liberationists embrace “more radical cultural change, change that is transformational in nature and often arises outside the formal structures of the U.S. political system.” On the other hand, “[t]he assimilationist approach typically embraces a rights-based perspective, works within the broader framework of pluralist democracy … and fights for a seat at the table” and tends to be more gradualist and “patient with creeping toward long-term movement goals” (2008, pp. 5, 133). Writer Michael Bronski adds, on the cultural politics of assimilation versus liberation: “The assimilationist position is predicated on a deeply held belief in the worth of such basic social structures as traditional sexual morality, monogamous marriage, accepted gender roles, and the nuclear family” (1998, p. 3), and this has characterized the mainstream movement since its inception after World War II (Rimmerman, 2002).

LGBTQ people and activists have had the same debates and tensions as other marginalized Americans about whether it is best to assimilate to mainstream norms and institutions or whether these American institutions are fundamentally broken and in need of rejection in favor of community-controlled alternatives. These movements have also, since the beginning of social action, targeted the law for change, used the law to advance civil equality, and, conversely, recognized the limits of the law in changing culture and everyday private behavior. Social movements are not and have never been just about mass, collective action. Art, media, culture, and popular culture have always been sites and vehicles for social change, for bringing in new voices, for resistance and community-building, and for telling stories that can build sympathy and empathy. So, too, we will see, social movements develop in relationship to each other, whether that is building on movements with the same general political orientation from the Left or responding to movements that are directly opposed from the Right. Finally, people who come together in communities and social movements may share something of their biographies and experiences, but they also differ in important ways, by race, gender, gender identity, class, sexual orientation, religion, ability or immigration status. These differences matter a lot in the way that movements are shaped. The way that I tell this story of diversity and difference here is to focus on privilege and the role it has played in LGBTQ movements over time.

It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that homosexuality began to be named and mobilized around as an identity; the mid-twentieth before gender identity would become politicized.² In the US, gay and lesbian people began to develop their own cultures and communities in the early part of the twentieth century. But it was not until World War II, when both gay and lesbian visibility and repression rose significantly, that the seeds of the modern movements were sown in the US and around the world. The first lesbian and gay political organizations in the US were founded in the 1950s, as small, mostly secretive groups known as the homophile movement. Through the 1960s, when gay men and lesbians now had other contemporaneous examples of social movements from which to draw inspiration and practical lessons, they began to organize for change. The Stonewall rebellion, when New York City bar-goers and their supporters fought back against the kind of police repression that had become routine for them, changed the future of LGBTQ politics.

After Stonewall, the gay liberation movement blossomed and produced more than a thousand organizations dedicated to a wide range of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender efforts for social change. The liberation movement, at the height of the radical late 1960s and early 1970s, shifted within a couple of years into a kind of gay pride and gay rights movement – a gay identity movement (Armstrong, 2002) – that has continued to this day. When AIDS blindsided the community with such force in the early 1980s, AIDS activism became another – separate but related – part of the broader sexual identity movement. Out of AIDS activism, too, came a challenge from the Left to broaden the movement, making space for bisexual and transgender activists to both join the pan-identity movement and to continue to articulate their own interests and politics. Since then, over the past few decades, we have seen efforts for social change on scores of different fronts: from explicitly political fights to change civil rights laws, to efforts to change school culture and sports culture, to media campaigns to increase visibility, to the renewal of longstanding fights to recognize and fully honor intersectional identities.

One of the primary arguments of this book is that movements for social change take many forms. When you think about social movements, you might envision large groups of people holding hands in solidarity or marching in a mass with signs and bullhorns: those iconic images on posters, stamps, and in the pages of history texts. Or, you might recall a sketch from a children’s picture book or grainy documentary of a small, brave group of people – maybe even one person at first – sitting, standing, fighting back, riding a bus or not riding a bus in a public act of defiance. These are collective, public actions for change. This kind of activism often focuses on the state, on changing laws and policy. But, these are just some of the kinds of activism that are part of LGBTQ – and many other – movements.

From the social movement literature that specifically takes up LGBTQ organizing,³ I draw specifically on that which understands the cultural to be an important part of the political.⁴ Some of this kind of activism focuses on the state – on making demands on the government for social welfare or for civil rights protections.⁵ Other forms of LGBTQ activism that are central to my discussion are not primarily state-centered and may be, instead, about raising visibility, building alternative communities and identities, and changing hearts and minds both for and beyond the purpose of changing laws. Some may be a combination of both – using cultural and symbolic tactics for the purposes of effecting law and policy change.

Sociologist Joshua Gamson, for instance, identifies an “orientation towards identity and expression” in the direct action AIDS activism of the late 1980s, which, while “cultural” and “theatrical” in nature – as we will see in chapter 3 – was nevertheless aimed at changing science, industry, and public policy (1989, p. 355). Sociologist Verta Taylor and colleagues write of the 2004 mass wedding protest in San Francisco – featured in chapter 4 – that those who participated in this kind of cultural protest, a wedding that had the mayor’s blessing but was not certified by the state, was a form of laying claim to a state-given civil right (marriage) and had the effect of spurring its participants into “more traditional forms of political action” (2009, p. 886). They argue that “social movements often adapt, create, and use culture – ritual, music, street theatre, art, the Internet, and practices of everyday life – to make collective claims” (2009, p. 866). Similarly, as sociologist Amin Ghaziani writes, even cultural forms of mobilization – like making a residential choice to live in the “space of freedom” of gay neighborhoods – have the political impact of providing an incubator for political engagement and action from a position of strength (2014, p. 3). So, too, do drag shows, as Leila J. Rupp and Taylor argue, which are both cultural performances of and commentary on the complexity of gender and sexuality and protest-oriented “political events” (2003, p. 3).

Focusing on this understanding of social movements that combines the cultural and the political – and that understands the cultural to be political – in the chapters that follow I look at a number of efforts within US LGBTQ social movements that I feel are particularly instructive and central to the way that social change around gender and sexuality has occurred since World War II. The first three chapters are roughly chronological and illustrate the main themes of the book, introducing us to some of the primary fights of recent generations that focus both on state-directed and cultural change. Chapter 2 examines the early days of gay and lesbian organizing, the period before Stonewall, and the years through the 1970s that were so impacted by the Stonewall rebellion. This chapter, too, focuses on the rise of the Religious Right and the way that this new conservative movement gained strength and numbers from its anti-gay activism. Chapter 3 focuses on AIDS activism from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, with attention, as well, given to the role of the Right in LGBTQ experience and organizing. Chapter 4 looks closely at marriage politics: this issue that has been so central to mainstream LGBTQ organizing since the early 2000s.

For the next two chapters, I have chosen examples of LGBTQ organizing that show both the range and the nuance of the movement as well as cultural change at work. These are two sites of change that I believe are going to be at the forefront of the movement in the years to come: youth activism – through schooling and media – and activism around the complexity and diversity of sexuality and gender. Chapter 5 focuses on young LGBTQ people: their experiences in and around schools, the ways they have responded to the homophobia and transphobia they have experienced in schools, and social change efforts that have developed around young people to support them and help them build communities in school and through popular culture. Chapter 6 looks specifically at bisexual and transgender experience, exclusion, and politics and the ways in which the “B” and the “T” prompt us to recognize and understand many forms of diversity, privilege, and division within LGBTQ communities and movements and orient us toward the future of the movement and its reaction on the Right.

As with almost any other book on LGBTQ issues, it is important to say a little bit about terminology and scope. I have chosen to use the term “LGBTQ” to generally apply to the communities and the set of movements that I have included in this book. I have worked to be historically and politically accurate in my writing, in that I attempt to use the self- and community-given language of the time and try not to be more inclusive in my language than activists were in their time (by, for instance, using “LGBTQ” when an organization did not, in fact, have anything to do with trans people or issues). This might seem inconsistent in the way this is written. For instance, activists in the 1950s and 1960s often used “gay” to be inclusive of gay men and lesbians. By the 1970s, “and lesbian” was added as lesbian feminists asserted their own identities and interests and called out the sexism in the gay movement. These lesbian and gay movements through the 1960s and 1970s did not have a politics or theory of bisexuality. While there was a lot of talk of gender fluidity and performance, and people who were gender nonconforming were absolutely leaders of and participants in these earlier movements, there was no explicit “transgender” inclusion or politics until the 1990s at least, when “LGBT” came to be the label that activists used to define their work and their communities. For the current time, and just within the past few years, the “Q” in LGBTQ is increasingly, though not universally, used. Some people still prefer “LGBT,” particularly in describing the mainstream civil rights movement. As we will see in chapter 3, the reappropriation of the word “queer” in the early 1990s was and remains controversial. Throughout the book, I will say more about the meanings of each of these terms in their historical context.

Of course, it is important to remember that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities and labels have not always existed in the same way they do now. All identities are socially constructed and historically contingent. This does not make them any less real. It simply means that we need to understand labels, terms, and identities as having particular histories, as coming from some place rather than being naturally given, and as necessarily and constantly changing over time. For example, Rupp (2009) writes of gender fluidity and about same-sex desire and love between women around the world and since prehistorical times, well before any labels defined or circumscribed these individuals and their relationships. And historians Rupp (2009), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1975), and Lillian Faderman (1991) all write of a time in late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Europe and the US, a time of supposed repressive sexuality and restrictive sexual and gender norms, when some women were allowed – even celebrated for – a level of physical and emotional intimacy with each other that would come to be pathologized in the twentieth century. Lesbians, as a social and political category of people, did not exist yet, even though same-sex love and sex between women did. Faderman argues that the lesbian category came into being through the development of an increased faith in science and through a series of economic, demographic, and social changes, such as the possibility of women’s financial independence and the development of women’s educational, military, and social institutions.

Similarly, it is important to remember that terminology shifts in its use and connotation substantially over time. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US, men who had sex with men were distinguished – as fairy, queer, and trade, for example – by their gender expression and sometimes by the gender expression of their lovers, rather than by their orientation toward men as romantic and sexual partners (Chauncey, 1994). It was only in the 1930s and 1940s that these distinctions consolidated around the term gay, and then this term may have also referred to lesbians, bisexuals, and even transgender people (Faderman & Timmons, 2009).

Even in using LGBTQ for the way in which the modern movement frames itself, I have made some specific choices here about which groups I am including and which I am leaving out. I do not, for example, talk at all about intersex politics, which have developed since the 1990s (Chase, 1998; Stryker, 2008; Morland, 2014), nor do I examine the politics and identity of asexuality that have gained visibility in recent years (Decker, 2014; Gremore, 2016). There are so many variations on the pan-identity acronym these days. One capacious label is “LGBTQ+.” Some use “queer” as a broad, inclusive term for gender and sexual minorities, others find this term to be alienating. I have made the choice, however, that “LGBTQ,” while admittedly limited, best represents the history and politics as I tell it here of movements for gender/sexual social change in the US in the past few generations.

In this book, we will encounter just some of the many activists over the generations who marched and demonstrated and argued cases before the Supreme Court. We will also meet activists who built movements around alternative cultural institutions, or around their music and art, their science, their bars, and their music festivals. We will see that LGBTQ Americans have broken their silences in so many ways over the generations. It is to those ways that we now turn.