Gay Liberation

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.

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.

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.