Gay Liberation

Leading up to and during the events of May 1968, many young people turned away from the French Communist Party (PCF) and were notably hostile towards it, expressing disapproval at the Party’s organisation and stance on international conflicts and social issues. This final year project analyses the reactions of young people towards the political ideology of the PCF, its responses to international conflicts and links to the USSR, and the socially conservative attitudes of the Party. Moreover, it will be argued that these three factors were the principal reasons why young people turned away from the Party during the May ‘68 era.

The PCF, since its foundation in 1920, was very closely linked to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Party’s political identity and actions were shaped by their close relationship. However, amongst the younger generation, the USSR was considered to be a bureaucratic and oppressive regime and many young people were of the opinion that, whilst so closely linked to the USSR, the PCF would never be able to bring about a socialist revolution in France. The Party’s internal organisation and its ideological differences with the younger generation drew criticism from the May ’68 generation and its actions during the events frustrated young people.

The Party’s failure to distance itself from the Soviet Union following the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968 angered many young people and its failure to adequately address the issue of Algerian Independence also drew criticism. Given the international nature of the events of May ‘68, as well as the PCF’s reaction to international conflicts, many young people began to look abroad and take influence from various revolutionary movements in the Third-World, such as China, Vietnam and Cuba.

Throughout the 1960s, the PCF took a very conservative approach to the pressing social issues of the era, such as homosexuality and women’s rights. Many prominent homosexual intellectuals and activists criticised the Party for its stance and accused it of fomenting homophobia amongst those on the left. The Party’s stance on women’s rights, in relation to abortion and contraception, was in direct contrast to the demands of the women’s liberation movement that emerged after May 1968.
This project analyses tracts and posters released by student groups during May ‘68, including articles and interviews from those directly involved in the events, articles from the PCF official newspaper L’Humanité and existing scholarship to examine why young people moved away from the Party.

I analyze three case studies of marriage equality activism and marriage equality–based groups after the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Evaluating the JoinTheImpact protests of 2008, the LGBTQ rights group GetEQUAL, and the group One Struggle One Fight, I argue that these groups revise queer theoretical arguments about marriage equality activism as by definition assimilationist, homonormative, and single-issue. In contrast to such claims, the cases studied here provide a snapshot of heterogeneous, intersectional, and coalition-based social justice work in which creative methods of protest, including direct action and flash mobs, are deployed in militant ways for marriage rights and beyond.

The current historiography on the early gay and lesbian liberation movement in Ireland [1970s-1990s] has resulted in a narrative which has focused solely on the battle to decriminalise sexual activity between males. In turn, this has presented a picture of a movement comprised of one individual [David Norris] and one goal [decriminalisation]. This narrative is predominantly an urban one, which excludes the activities of provincial activists, and most notably lesbian women. In this paper, I move away from viewing David Norris’ legal battle as the only form of resistance to Ireland’s sexual mores. Instead, I explore the other, often forgotten, forms of resistance carried out by Ireland’s gay and lesbian citizens; such as their attempts to create public spaces for gay and lesbian individuals; the appearance of homosexuals in the media to try dispel the negative stereotypes of homosexuality, and finally, their organisation of public demonstrations to declare pride in their identity and demand their place in Irish society. By doing so, these actions facilitated a public dialogue around homosexuality, which ultimately helped change the negative assumptions surrounding homosexuality and renegotiated Ireland’s sexual mores.

Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual mainstream and celebrating differences. We contrast earlier movement cycles mobilized around difference with efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. Our review highlights the turning points that led to shifts in protest cycles, and we trace the consequences for movement outcomes. Scholarship will advance if researchers recognize the path-dependent nature of social movements and that sameness and difference are not oppositional, static, or discrete choices. We conclude by recommending directions for future research.

'Across the 'In formation' programme, the interweaving politics of gender, sexuality and race are placed in tension with notions of sociality and knowledge production institutionalized by the ‘academy’. Taking its title from Paul Thek’s teaching instructions, Design a flying saucer as if it were The Ark is a performative lecture by Caspar Heinemann on gay liberation history, consensus reality and magical technologies. Questioning the boundaries of legitimate knowledge production, the lecture will utilise the insights of para-academic and independent researchers in the fields of transpersonal psychology, comparative theology and Western esoteric history in an attempt to prefiguratively map the territory.'

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld details a demonstration in which he participated protesting the American Psychiatric Association's designation of homosexuality as a so-called "Ego-Dystonic Disorder," a mental illness in a similar category with schizophrenia and manic depressive disorder.  The article investigates how the psychiatric profession constructed and then deconstructed homosexuality as a mental disease.

Surgido en la década del setenta en Argentina en un clima de radicalización política y dentro del marco de la nueva izquierda, el “Frente de Liberación Homosexual” apostará a una alianza con las organizaciones de izquierda. La investigación analizará diacrónicamente tanto las mutaciones en los discursos políticos y en las estrategias de lucha que se articularon en el diseño de esta alianza como las tensiones y contradicciones que esta propuesta generó en relación con las bases, al interior de la agrupación, y con el resto de las organizaciones militantes.

In this article, I seek to recast silence as a possible means of escaping from the dead-end of homosexuality.  I wish to (re)claim a right to silence when it comes to having sex with a body of the same sex.  Whereas coming out of the closet is seen still by many as a rejection of the straight and very narrow, and as a flight into the wide and open spaces of gayness, the categorisation of all men who have sexual contact with other men as “homosexual” too is dangerously restrictive.

This text examines Mother Boats C.P. photographs of the very first gay parade down Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles in June 1970, in celebration of the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City. These mainly unpublished photographs are important because they bear witness to the people, the places and the event as it was taking place: the first flowering of mass gay visibility and sensibility the world had ever seen.

People often ask me if I was “at Stonewall,” and I’m one of the few people who will definitely say, “No.” I was actually around the corner at an old bar called Julius’, when some young men raced in to tell us that “the girls are rioting at the Stonewall!”

It took me a while to understand what that meant: police actions, demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches had become the order of the day due to the Vietnam War, and the social and political unrest of the period.  Late the next night, I went out to Sheridan Square and saw what was going on — ​the broken glass, hundreds of people milling about; the sharp, glaring police “riot lights” that produced their own theatre of the streets. Lots of what we called “street queens” — that is, young gay people who had a street life, something almost non-existent in America today.

They were smiling — so was I — I was ebullient, glowing, really.

Why? ​
​It is very hard for most people to understand the everyday horror and humiliation of being queer in New York then, of being the constant butt not only of jokes, but of threats, of physical and emotional violence, of keeping so much of your life under wraps — hardly even in a closet, but in a sewer — ​of feeling like a worthless outsider, with basically no legal or ethical rights, or recourse.

Abstract for a paper to be delivered to a virtual conference on Gender and Sexuality, January 2021 hosted by SCIINov Group.

Title: Reconfiguring 'Gay Liberation’:  Life Writing and queer identity beyond the heteronormative paradigm.

Name: Victor Marsh
School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland AUSTRALIA

“ I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”
—Jessica Rabbit

My research focuses on the liberation of queer folk from oppressive representations of identity tethered to sexuality and certain psycho-pathological notions of a failure along ‘normal’ developmental pathways.  I interrogate the role of conventional religions in producing a pariah caste through constructions that thrive on “the violence of exclusion” and cheat queer folk from developing their full potential as it is envisioned in other cultural models not dependent on these toxic, homophobic narratives.

Socrates is reported to have said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Memoir, autobiography, etc. provide useful tools for a re-assessment and re-framing of the meaning of diverse life journeys and to recuperate those lost parts of self otherwise silenced in conventional telling. 

Dis-illusionment can be a significant rite of passage, an initiation, perhaps, that while it dislocates queer folk from adherence to hostile ruling paradigms, may force them to move beyond conventional boundaries to pursue intelligent spiritual inquiry as a tool for exploring meaning, and growing into an enhanced experience of their 'place' in the universe.

Biography
A writer, editor, researcher and lecturer, Victor Marsh completed his PhD at the age of 62 at the University of Queensland, where he is currently attached as a Research Fellow. His thesis dissertation was titled “The Journey of the Queer ‘I’: Spirituality and Subjectivity in life narratives by some ‘gay’ writers.”  Previously he worked in TV production in Sydney, Melbourne and Los Angeles and performed in activist theatre productions at the Pram Factory theatre in Melbourne, including the first production of the Women’s Theatre Group.  He has contributed papers to peer-reviewed international journals, and book chapters in several landmark collections. Earlier he spent more than a decade as a modern-day monk studying and teaching meditation in more than a dozen countries.

The current historiography on the early gay and lesbian liberation movement in Ireland 1970s-1990s has resulted in a narrative which has focused solely on the battle to decriminalise sexual activity between males. In turn, this has presented a picture of a movement comprised of one individual, David Norris, and one goal, decriminalisation. This narrative is predominantly an urban one, which excludes the activities of provincial activists, and most notably lesbian women. In this paper, I move away from viewing David Norris’ legal battle as the only form of resistance to Ireland’s sexual mores. Instead, I explore the other, often forgotten, forms of resistance carried out by Ireland’s gay and lesbian citizens; such as their attempts to create public spaces for gay and lesbian individuals; the appearance of homosexuals in the media to try dispel the negative stereotypes of homosexuality, and finally, their organisation of public demonstrations to declare pride in their identity and dem...

The story of Otis Francis Tabler, the first openly gay person to gain a security clearance, explores the intersection of federal policies, Los Angeles, and gay liberation through longtime Washington D.C. LGBT activist Frank Kameny and Tabler.

Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing similarities to the heterosexual mainstream and celebrating differences. We contrast earlier movement cycles mobilized around difference with efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. Our review highlights the turning points that led to shifts in protest cycles, and we trace the consequences for movement outcomes. Scholarship will advance if researchers recognize the path-dependent nature of social movements and that sameness and difference are not oppositional, static, or discrete choices. We conclude by recommending directions for future research.

Few instances in the modern movement for gay and lesbian equality  produced as much controversy-and turmoil-as the New York Gay Liberation Front’s relationship with the Black Panthers, a late 1960’s-early 1970’s radical organization that stood for the complete overthrow of the capitalist American government to achieve equality for African-Americans. The Gay Liberation Front was the first and most radical organization to be formed after the Stonewall Riots (or Uprising) in June of 1969. I joined GLF in mid-November of 1969, and by this time there was already a definite but not always comfortable relationship between the two groups.

An emerging critical theoretical framework, queer liberation theory attempts to understand the relationship between queerness and capitalism, and more specifically, anti-capitalist movements. It seeks to update and reinvigorate the structural analysis of the earlier gay/queer liberation movement (1960s and 1970s) with the benefit of the insights of queer theory and empirical queer experiences of neoliberal capitalism. Queer liberation theory recognizes and celebrates diverse sexual orientations and gender identities or expression, including essentialist identities such as gay, lesbian, and trans. Within a realist, structural framework, queer liberation theory is interested in how social movements can move beyond identity formation to produce progressive, structural change. To date, three main tenets of the theory have been noted: anti-assimilationism, solidarity across social movements, and the political economy of queerness. The use of the word “queer” signals a progressive, critical, sex-positive, anti-assimilationist, liberationist perspective as opposed to an assimilationist perspective that strives for respectability, acceptance, prestige, and monetary success on capitalism’s terms. The second tenet, solidarity across movements, is an attempt to transcend to the divisiveness of single-issue politics without sacrificing intersectionality. For example, queer liberation theory seeks to recognize, expose, and dismantle social structures that oppress all communities, albeit in different ways. The political economy of queerness refers to a class analysis of structural inequalities. A genealogy of queer liberation theory’s development shows where it reflects, incorporates, or rejects aspects of various theories including a social constructionist perspective, with its debates about essentialism and identities; social movement theory, with its political tensions between recognition and redistribution; queer theory, with its focus on fluidity and ambiguity; materialism, with the strengths and shortcomings of its class analysis; and intersectionality with its focus on a matrix worldview of interlocking systems of oppression; and feminist political economy, with its focus on social reproduction, but adequate recognition of queer sexuality. Indeed, feminist political economy offers something of a pink road map to discover what aspects of the economy will be important for queer liberation theory to explore. Feminist political economy is helpful in the development of queer liberation theory because it has long claimed sexuality and identity as legitimate, as opposed to frivolous, sites of scholarship and political struggle. Feminist political economy, like queer liberation theory, seeks to understand oppression based on sexuality in everyday life. However, the feminist political economy road map takes us only so far, because the focus of the analysis can be seen as gendered, and often cisgendered, lives. Queer liberation theory attempts to draw from these theories to better understand the relationship between queerness and capitalism and provide a basis for political action.

Book Chapter.  'Poetry and Work: Work in Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry'. Jo Lindsay Walton & Ed Luker (eds). London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 195-244.
In the early 1970s John Wieners became involved in significant activities of the Gay Liberation movement in Boston, Massachusetts and beyond, alongside Boston’s Mental Patients’ Liberation Front. Wieners’ involvement included reading poems at movement events; attending national events as a Gay Liberation representative; and publishing writing in numerous radical newspapers. Wieners was also part of the publishing collective for Fag Rag, a gay male anarchist newspaper. Drawing upon Wieners’ archives and that of Gay Liberation organisers and newspapers, this chapter situates Wieners’ poetic praxis, the publication of his work and its critical reception, within the work of the Gay Liberation movement. Wieners understood his poetry and political action as both important aspects of supporting the transformations of everyday life engendered by Gay Liberation. The chapter develops the dialectic of queer labour and queer consciousness posited by Matthew Tinkcom (as “camp labour” and “camp consciousness”), to theorise and consider the labour of Wieners and the Fag Rag collective as a mode of “queer world-making” (Berlant and Warner).

Mai 1979. Arcadie, mouvement « homophile » , fête ses 25 ans au Palais des Congrès de Paris. Arcadie n’est-elle pas alors à l’arrière-garde du combat homosexuel ? Baudry ne s’apprête-t-il pas à l’auto-dissoudre en 1982, enregistrant par là-même son appartenance au passé et la renvoyant aux poubelles de l’histoire ? Le grand rassemblement a pourtant un invité de marque. Michel Foucault y prononce une célèbre conférence sur Herculine Barbin, dont il récemment exhumé le journal . « Avons-nous vraiment besoin d’un vrai sexe », y demande le philosophe, qui proclame que « le plaisir n’a pas de passeport, pas de carte d’identité » . Compagnon des mouvements radicaux de la décennie, aisément associé aux avant-gardes politiques et artistiques, il est alors au sommet de sa célébrité intellectuelle. Sa conférence anticipe les fulgurances queer des décennies suivantes. Que faisait-il alors dans cette galère « homophile » ?

Progress as history's driving force has been among the first guidelines to be severely questioned following numerous transformations that affected historiography in the Nineteenth-Century, beginning with its opposition to speculative philosophies of history and all the way up to the more recent visibilization of teleological features present, albeit not overtly, in contemporary narratives. Histories of LGBT or queer communities pose particular challenges in this respect, since in them the idea of progress, albeit its difficulties, has played a crucial role when imagining better life conditions for historically neglected collectives. This paper seeks to detect and analyze the ways in which the idea of progress persists in 21st-Century narratives, even in the domain of projects, such as many LGBT or queer histories, which renounce explicitly to Modern-style teleologies. It studies the mechanisms and resources through which those stories are produced, and the consequences they entail, with particular attention to stories about sex and/or gender non-conforming subjects. With this aim in mind, it starts by addressing some key issues on the idea of progress in history; secondly, it considers how they are built, looking into their preferred plots, themes, and strategies; further on, the paper focuses on the political consequences of narratives of progress, what is enabled and hindered for the subjects that produce them and the ones they address. The project aims at pinpointing the implicit teleology of contemporary LGBT histories, considering their political consequences, and contributing to the elaboration of responsible alternatives.

Gay is everywhere. Canada's new loonie celebrates 50 years of official gaydom. All the celebratory marches ignore the stark truth that the height of gaylib was long ago, 1978. The next 40 years has been a slow motion hangover, the homosexualization of America. Who better to turn to for assessing the state of the union than Edmund White, author of The Joy of Gay Sex (1977)?

The Lexicon, published in Italy under the auspices of the Papal Council for the Family, provides a dictionary of terms (such as gender, homosexuality, and homophobia) that the Vatican has found problematic in their use. This essay discusses implications as well as the consequences if the Lexicon is adopted as a reference textbook by educators or used in parochial and public schools and details Italian activists'challenge to its use and sale. The authors conclude by raising questions on the freedom of speech and the role of education and educators in reducing prejudice and encouraging greater tolerance.