“Queer Nation is Dead/Long Live Queer Nation”: The Politics and Poetics of Social Movement and Media Representation

Abstract

This paper fleshes out the rhetorical structure of Queer Nation/San Francisco (QN/SF), a direct action group lauded for challenging the terms of gay and lesbian visibility politics but seen as failing to sustain that challenge. It juxtaposes representations of QN/SF—from regional mainstream and gay press accounts, QN/SF's internal organizational archives, and interviews with former QN/SF members—to parse out the competing interests that shaped QN/SF's discursive strategies and to chart what coalesced in the media spotlight as QN/SF's primary objective. Drawing on comparative analyses of these representations, this paper argues that press coverage of QN/SF's more spectacular actions, uniformly portrayed in mainstream and gay media as defiant acts of gay and lesbian visibility, undermined QN/SF's attempts to build a broader, multi-issue social justice coalition. While QN/SF's demise cannot be wholly explained by its treatment in the regional mainstream and gay press, this paper reopens the public record of QN/SF to examine the implications of its queer dilemma as an object of publicity. It suggests that QN/SF's less publicized actions, concerned with processing the meaning of identity, warrant greater attention for what they may proffer a queer politics of coalitional social justice and, more broadly, social movements’ media strategies.