Afterword: Reflections on Three Decades of Lesbian and Gay Psychology

Abstract

The ideas that eventually crystallized into The Social Construction of Lesbianism (Kitzinger, 1987) have their origins in an event that took place more than 30 years ago. Just 17, I was expelled from school for suspected lesbianism. It was the early 1970s and there were no ‘out’ lesbians or gay men in the small Oxfordshire village where my family lived, nor do I remember ever having seen lesbian or gay issues discussed in the media – indeed, I barely understood what, exactly, I was being accused of. I am of the generation growing up as Martin Luther King’s impassioned ‘I have a dream’ speech – a demand for freedom and justice for American ‘Negroes’ – was broadcast on crackling radios across the world; as heated public debates raged about the international community’s response to the massacre and starvation in Biafra; and as the Aldermaston protest (re)launched a powerful British nuclear disarmament movement. I was a teenager when the UK government responded to feminist pressure by enacting a startling piece of legislation (the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act) requiring employers to give women ‘equal pay for equal work’; and – like everyone else I knew – I boycotted the products of apartheid South Africa and joined the protests against the killing of Steve Biko in police custody. These struggles against oppression and injustice were discussed over the family dinner table and raised in Quaker meetings for worship on Sundays. My collection of badges/buttons included ‘ban the bomb’, ‘power to the people’, ‘stuff the system’, ‘silence is the voice of complicity’ and ‘equal pay NOW!’ But I knew nothing about lesbian and gay issues. Homosexuality was never discussed as a compelling issue of social and political justice. Searching for information about my ‘perversion’, I consulted psychology books in the local library: they told me I was sick. The psychology textbooks of