Gay Liberation Movement Research Articles

Rediscovering Guy Gilles, pioneer of queer

ABSTRACT This article positions Guy Gilles (1938–1996), an overlooked filmmaker at the periphery of the French New Wave, as an important pioneer of queer cinema. Situating Gilles in the context of the French gay liberation movement and the militant gay cinema of the 1970s, it brings the director in dialogue with the French philosopher, writer and activist Guy Hocquenghem, whose advocacy of a polyvocal sexual desire resonates with Gilles’s interrogation of traditional sexual taxonomies. Gilles’s fluid vision of sexuality is analysed in two seminal films, Absences répétées/Repeated Absences (1972) and Le Crime d’amour/For Love (1981), which crystallise the director’s exploration of non-normative desires and queer aesthetic. Reclaiming Gilles’s place in the wider genealogy of French queer cinema, the article seeks to contribute to the long-overdue rediscovery of this highly original director, who remains largely unknown in Film and Visual Studies.

Queering family history and the lives of Irish men before gay liberation

ABSTRACT Historians of sexuality commonly ‘read against the grain’ of the criminal archive as a way to reconstruct both the pitfalls and possibilities of queer cruising cultures. One of the drawbacks of this approach is how it can limit our knowledge of queer men to the fleeting moments of pleasure that led to an arrest, thus obscuring the broader complexities of their social world. The sources that can take us beyond this limited viewpoint – such as diaries, letters and memoirs – tend not to survive for same-sex desiring working-class men who did not live in major metropolises. In this article, I offer a replicable method for uncovering and reconstructing such difficult-to-access lives. By queering the practice of family history, the criminal archive becomes just a starting point that can be enriched through genealogical data, such as censuses, birth/marriage/death registrations, as well as more colourful information from now-digitised newspapers. The resulting ‘small queer histories’, I argue, can contribute to not just a deeper understanding of the sexual past but support important political work in the present too. To demonstrate both this methodology and its contemporary value, I use a case study of one man’s life in Ireland in the time before a Gay Liberation movement. I show how it was kinship networks that provided both the emotional and financial resources that enabled this man to both fight against a charge of ‘gross indecency’ and flourish in the decades after his arrest. This surprising reality of past support is of particular importance in a region where religiously sanctioned homophobia and intolerance were later informed by the supposed antipathy of the family to queer desires.

Queerchronotopia

This paper joins the debate of a still-expanding literature on queer temporalities that, among other things, raises the question of a queer-specific construction of time. This specific temporality is what I call queerchronotopia. By setting the description of the historical worldview (as described by Reinhart Koselleck, Sepp Gumbrecht, and François Hartog) against queer methodologies developed by scholars like Paul B. Preciado and Jack J. Halberstam, this article claims that, since the last decades of the nineteenth century, definitions and embodiments of queerness and a queer-specific temporality are constantly revised in light of the temporal shift between two paradigmatic social constructions of time—the historical worldview and “our broad present”. First, we summarize how homosexuality goes from an ahistorical aberration at the end of the 19th century to the emergence of the historical homos at the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. Second, we try to demonstrate how the appearance of identity temporalities as an aftereffect of identity politics in the 1970s unveils some of the fractures in the temporal experience anchored in the historical worldview. Lastly, we discuss how the latent “broad present” that had already shown some of its aspects in the aftermath of the gay liberation movement and civil rights era in the United States became more evident in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic becomes increasingly intertwined with a concern with the health of the planet. Without dismissing the pessimist tone that has permeated the academic and intellectual discussions about the future of the planet and the catastrophic threats to human and nonhuman entities living in the Anthropocene, this article concludes by suggesting that the queer community and its activism, particularly in response to the AIDS epidemic, could teach us some lessons about how to live “with the trouble” in our present.

Peter Tuesday Hughes: Forgotten Pioneer of the Gay Gothic

Vincent Virga’s Gaywyck (1980) has enjoyed sustained critical and commercial interest due to the claim that it is the first Gothic novel to depict unambiguous same-sex romance. While enthusiasm for Gaywyck is warranted, there is an earlier ‘gay Gothic’ novel which should be recognized as the first. Peter Tuesday Hughes’s Gay Nights at Maldelangue (1969) is a literary fantasia of same-sex desire and classic gothic storytelling. Published shortly after the Stonewall Uprising, it is also among the first creative interactions with the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s. Although Hughes wrote at least thirty-two novels, was a critical success and top seller for his publisher, he is largely forgotten today – to the extent that we do not know whether he is alive or even if that is his real name.

"Jewish" Genocidal Villains for Children? Emergent Holocaust Consciousness and Postwar Antisemitism in One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

ABSTRACT: This article studies how two popular 1960s Anglophone children's films projected antisemitic ideas onto genocidal villains. Focusing on Cruella de Vil of Walt Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and the Child Catcher of Ken Hughes's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), it analyzes the appearance of ethnically stereotyped, Jewish-suggestive figures presented as enactors of genocidal violence, rather than as victims or survivors of it. Subliminally reversing the resonance of the Holocaust's Jewish victimization by non-Jewish Europeans, these films both touch upon themes of genocidal atrocity that were belatedly emerging in broader Western popular culture of the 1960s, as well as maintain an antisemitic ethnic hierarchy in which implicitly "Jewish," non-white, and queer bodies appear unworthy or dangerous. In these films, villains marked by Jewish, racialized, and queer stereotypes, as well as by antisemitic paradigms, categorically oppose the existence of an entire demographic or seek to confine and/or annihilate that demographic for their own perceived wellbeing. Contextualizing and analyzing this phenomenon, I consider its potential meanings for 1960s American audiences in relation to their shifting social and political realities, including the waning of public antisemitism, as well as the emergence of Second-Wave Feminism and the Gay Liberation movement.

The Doubly Discriminated in the Land of the Free: Exclusion and Empowerment of Queer People of Color from the 1960s to Modern America

This paper explores the double ostracization queer Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) endured in history, as an intersectional result of racist exclusion in the predominantly white narrative of the gay liberation movement and homophobia within oppressed racial groups. It describes how this double discrimination led to disproportionate impacts on the community in the AIDS epidemic from 1980s to 1990s. In the process, the paper restores the erased narratives of queer activists of color, showing how this community united to resist the double discrimination and to speak up through literature and alliances that ultimately overcame some of the societal barriers. Looking forward, the paper argues that a similar pattern is emerging in contemporary America with a disproportionate impact on queer and BIPOC people through the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Drawing on these insights, the paper concludes with the progress the American society has made toward equity for all.

The Dialectic of the International: Elaborating the Historical Materialism of the Gay Liberationists

Abstract What is the relation between sexuality and the international? The literature on sexuality within international studies demonstrates that a full appreciation of contemporary transformations of sexuality across the globe requires an interrogation of the divisions—West/non-West, North/South, or core/periphery—that characterize our view of the international. While many have studied how the transnational circulation of sexual discourses troubles such divisions, fewer have asked how they came about in the first place. Historical materialism is uniquely instructive in this regard. This methodology expounds the division of the international into distinct spheres as historically constituted and founded on capitalist social relations. Such a methodology can be found within the intellectual writings of the gay liberation movement. Through their fraught relationship with the Cuban government, which represented them as a cultural imperialist offensive against the newly formed Communist state, the gay liberationists developed a dialectical conception of the international that acknowledged the differential constitution of sexual life within specific contexts, yet sought to reveal the international systems of power that produce and regulate those seemingly distinct sexual formations across international divides. Gay liberationism, this article argues, offers us a rich tradition for developing accounts of sexuality within a stratified capitalist world order.

Transnational Italian Studies

Transnational Italian Studies

The Postminimal is Political: Social Activism in the Music of Julius Eastman and Ann Southam

The emergence of postminimalism around 1980 allowed composers to combine minimalist musical techniques with their own distinct compositional approaches. Some composers, including American Julius Eastman and Canadian Ann Southam, exercised a consciousness-raising approach to composition by infusing their postminimalist works with political messages relevant to the gay liberation and feminist movements of the late twentieth century. In the work Gay Guerrilla (1979), Eastman pursued an original compositional approach, which he called ‘organic music,’ to explore themes of heroism and courage in the work’s climax. These musical themes resonated with the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement in the United States, particularly the assassination of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. Additionally, the repetitive processes of Southam's Glass Houses No. 5 (1981) constitute a highly organised compositional approach wherein the same music is constantly repeated in different contexts. These tight patterns referenced the contemporary genre of 'women's music' by physically resembling patient and cyclic work done by hand – work traditionally completed by women – and by critiquing this collective experience of ‘women’s work.’ By including these political associations in their art, Julius Eastman and Ann Southam created consciousness-raising critiques of contemporary trends of North American social activism.
 Content Note: This paper discusses violence against the queer and trans community, including an assassination, and also mentions two musical compositions which use a racial slur in their titles.

Gay Subculture, AIDS, and Neo-Decadence: 1980s in Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002)

Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002) provides a glimpse to the gay subculture of 1980s’ London and New York, and contextualizes the issues like AIDS epidemic and gay liberation movement. The shown attributes of the gay subculture including the queer fashion trends, drug consumptions, and unprotected gay sex even at the risk of HIV transmission parallel the hedonistic and counter-normative ‘decadent’ aspects of Oscar Wilde’s source–text, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Cathode Narcissus, the video installation capturing the naked male beauty, makes Dorian the ‘dis-embodied’ model/emblem for gay pride in a digital era and marks the posthumanist shift in the new form of decadence or neo-decadence. This paper, with respect to Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, would engage to explore how the attributes of 1980s’ urban gay subculture and rapid transmission of HIV among gays come under the paradigm of neo-decadence in the fin de siècle (meaning, “end of the century”) of the twentieth century.

"Beer, Prayer and Nellydrama": (Im)Possibilities in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs

Stephanie Rountree examines the relational possibilities of queer performance in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs, a play that dramatizes the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge fire in New Orleans. Rountree contextualizes the fire within the scope of the twentieth century gay liberation movement and explores how the play's various production sites both embody and transcend the time and place of the tragedy.

"Dynamite Scrupulously Packed": A Revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year

The essay proposes a reinterpretation and revaluation of Henry Blake Fuller’s 1919 novel Bertram Cope’s Year and argues that it deserves permanent currency within the canon of gay fiction. My reinterpretation and revaluation of it is based on the premise that readings of it over the past 50 years (since Edmund Wilson’s 1970 essay on Henry Blake Fuller’s fiction in the New Yorker) have failed to understand its representation of homo-sexuality. Criticism of the novel has been based on post-Stonewall assumptions of what a 'gay novel’ should be and what cultural work is should perform. The post-Stonewall paradigm of the gay novel is that it is a coming-of-age story, a Bildungsroman, focused on a protagonist who, through a process of self-discovery, arrives at an acceptance and affirmation of his sexual identity. The prototype is Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice a precursor. To appreciate Bertram Cope’s Year, we must, I argue, abandon post-Stonewall presuppositions of what we should expect from a gay novel. Bertram Cope’s Year is not a coming-of-age novel. Rather it is a comic novel formed from Fuller’s successful fusion and subversion of the romantic comedy, the comedy of manners, and the campus novel. Bertram Cope is a comic hero who ultimately triumphs over the efforts of a college town, presided over the matchmaking socialite Medora Phillips, to marry him to one of the three young ladies in her circle. He is rescued from this unwanted marriage by his boyfriend, who arrives to save him from the unwanted marriage. Fuller successfully exploits the conventions of the comic novel to tell a story that anticipates one of the aspirations of the gay liberation movement half a century later. As such, it deserves permanent currency.

Reflections of a Public Loony

Reflections of a Public Loony Sandy Jeffs (bio) I have been a public loony for over thirty years. In an act of reclaiming my life from the catastrophe of schizophrenia, sharing my story with audiences empowered me to write my own narrative and to eventually see my life through a lens of hope. This act of hope was important because when I was diagnosed in 1976, hope was the first casualty of what was then considered a virtual death-sentence. The magnitude of such an existential crisis cannot be understated. For those of us who carried this diagnosis, we were condemned to a life of irretrievable madness from which we would never recover. That was the messaging we got from clinicians. But in the 1970s psychiatry was under attack in a world that was in a state of flux. The anti-authoritarian 1960s and 70s were heady times for social activism. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing in the USA while the Feminist and Gay Liberation movements across the world were gathering steam. And the antipsychiatry crusade was making waves in the world’s universities where sociology departments and intellectuals were enthusiastic followers of R.D. Laing, Cooper, Thomas S. Szasz, Erving Goffman, and Michel Foucault. Mad people, too, were emboldened by antipsychiatry which offered a robust critique of psychiatry and madhouses in which they were confined. These were characterised as oppressive, dehumanising institutions that represented all that was bad in a world ruled by capitalism. Schizophrenics were portrayed as victims who needed to be rescued from the clutches of psychopathic psychiatrists while tyrannical madhouses were seen as instruments of oppression. Placards from the mass demonstrations in Paris in 1968 proclaimed: Schizophrenics are the Proletariat! Maverick psychiatrist and the darling of the antipsychiatry movement, R.D. Laing, wrote seminal texts in which he describes schizophrenia as a sane response to an insane world. He offers a positive spin on a diagnosis that had such a negative clinical profile. In The Politics of Experience Laing writes that ‘if the human race survives, future men will … look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness … they will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ as one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds’.1 He goes on further to say ‘madness need not be all breakdown, it may also be break-through’.2 Schizophrenia, according to Laing, was [End Page 174] more like an awakening, a window into higher consciousness which at the time was what a lot of hippie and counter-culture young folks were searching for, often through the agency of recreational drugs. As a young student at La Trobe University in the 1970s which, ironically, was built on land excised from the large acreage on which three psychiatric institutions were built, including Larundel Psychiatric Hospital, I came across antipsychiatry in my sociology and history studies. Sociology was a forceful, unforgiving opponent of psychiatry, and it was where I was made aware of the infamous Rosenhan experiment that was seminal in the growing chorus against psychiatry. Psychologist by training, David Rosenhan set out to prove that clinicians could not distinguish the mad from the sane and to discredit the ‘pseudo-science’ of psychiatry. He sent students posing as voice-hearers into psychiatric hospitals. On presentation they were admitted into a ward and assessed by psychiatrists. They then acted normally and said they were no longer hearing voices. They weren’t believed and were forced to take medication. When they were finally discharged, all but one of the fake patients left with the diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia in remission’.3 It caused a storm in the academic world and an even bigger storm for psychiatry which had been embarrassed by the revelations that the veracity of psychiatric diagnoses was very shaky if not completely spurious. The case against psychiatry was mounting as was the case against the big stand-alone psychiatric hospitals. It was in the midst of this milieu that I began my career as a ‘psych patient’. Influenced by my studies, and by charismatic lecturers, I took on board the...

Gay and Lesbian Liberation in the Low Countries: From Stonewall to Pink Pillar

Abstract This article examines the legacy of Stonewall in the Netherlands and Belgium, exploring how the gay and lesbian liberation movement resonated with pre-existing activism, national political cultures, and the peculiar structure of civil society in the Low Countries. American influences were real but limited until the later 1970s when the emergence of anti-gay politics in the US fuelled international solidarity under the flag of Stonewall and Gay Pride. The Dutch and Flemish authorities’ willingness to accommodate the mainstream movements early on limited the appeal and effectiveness of confrontational liberationism.

Fashioning a “Male Actress”

This research documents the fashioning of Charles Pierce, a prominent female impersonator in the mid-to-late twentieth century. During his career of over forty years, Pierce delivered acclaimed comedic impressions of gay icons such as Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. This paper contextualizes and interprets the development of Pierce’s cross-dressing from tuxedo and a few woman’s fashion accessories (to avoid arrest) to full drag. Pierce’s career as self-styled “male actress” coincided with the gay liberation movement. Much has been written about drag, less about female impersonators, and no known research examining their costumes. This article thus provides a rare analysis of the material culture of female impersonation through Pierce’s costumes and accessories at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California plus the Charles Pierce papers at the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Library for the Performing Arts.

Queer Connections

This article examines the gay French author Jean Genet’s 1970 tour of the United States with the Black Panther Party, using Genet’s unusual relationship with the Panthers as a lens for analyzing the possibilities and pitfalls of radical coalition politics in the long sixties. I rely on mainstream and alternative media coverage of the tour, articles by Black Panthers and gay liberationists, and Genet’s own writings and interviews to argue that Genet’s connection with the Panthers provided a queer bridge between the Black Power and gay liberation movements. Their story challenges the neglect of such coalitions by historians of the decade and illuminates some of the reasons the Panthers decided to support gay liberation. At the same time, Genet distanced himself from the gay liberation movement, and his unusual connection with the Panthers highlights some of the difficulties activists faced in building and sustaining such alliances on a broad scale.

Antitainment 70

This article provides a contextual introduction to the performative lectures that I delivered at the Cruising the 1970s (CRUSEV) conferences in Valencia in April 2018 and Edinburgh in March 2019. These contributions revisited the work of radical drag performers from the United Kingdom and Spain, such as Rampova, Ocaña and Bloolips, alongside that of popular cultural icons of the time. The lectures took the form of antitainment, mixing elements of light entertainment, such as music and video, with socio-political commentary. The aim of the contributions was to compare and contrast the freedoms being explored in the 1970s in the United Kingdom, where the gay liberation movement was in full swing, with the complex reality of Spain, which was emerging from four decades of dictatorship under Franco. The article also situates these lectures in relation to other examples from my wider practice.

Deviations and Conversions, Seventies Style

The subject of this conversation is the ‘queer seventies’ as told through a heterogeneous scene of independent journalism and the burgeoning field of screen theory in Britain. Mandy Merck, who was there, and Laura Guy, who was not, explore the cultural practices coming out of the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements against a backdrop of political reform – including the Sexual Offences Act 1967, the Abortion Act of the same year, and the Equal Pay Act 1970. Turning to Merck’s work as an editor and cultural critic at Time Out, the discussion foregrounds independent print and contemporary cinema as intersecting contexts through which the theoretical insights associated with screen theory emerged. Also considered is whether the British roots of queer theory can be located in this period or, indeed, if the various deviations and conversions discussed might offer directions toward a different horizon of thought and politics.

Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness by Ben Nichols

Reviewed by: Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness by Ben Nichols Chris Coffman Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness. Ben Nichols. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 222. $120.00 (cloth). Ben Nichols's Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness interrogates queer theory's characteristic tendency to mount anti-normative and anti-assimilationist arguments against reductionism and the utilitarian visions it often serves. Examining the importance of sameness, normativity, and reduction within a critical paradigm that emphatically privileges difference, deviation, and complexity, Nichols convincingly demonstrates that these seemingly opposed impulses often turn back upon one another like a Möbius strip. Despite his often incisive critiques of the continued imbrication of queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, and Diana Fuss in European poststructuralism, a characteristically Derridean move animates Same Old, which shuttles between difference and sameness to reclaim the latter, subordinated concept. Ably showing that sameness remains an important consideration even for those queer theorists who seek to amplify difference, Same Old ultimately succeeds in avoiding the dangers of sameness, normativity, and reduction whose disavowed importance to queer theory Nichols underscores. [End Page 799] Well-crafted and convincingly argued, Same Old moves from the fin-de-siècle and the modernist era through to the "lesbian and gay liberation movements" of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond (6). Nichols revisits sameness despite its repudiation by queer theorists who rightfully contest early twentieth-century psychoanalysis's conflation of homosexuality with narcissism. The book's chapters—defined by adjectives that either malign queers ("Useless") or are frequently maligned by them ("Reproductive," "Normative," and "Reductive")—cross-read literary with queer theoretical texts to illuminate these concepts' continued salience despite their disparagement. The first chapter, "Useless," focuses on aestheticism's anti-utilitarian ethos, returning to the late nineteenth-century work of Walter Pater (The Renaissance, 1873), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891), and especially Henry James (Roderick Hudson, 1875; The Tragic Muse, 1890) to explore contemporary queer theorists' recent mining of potentially "useful" elements of "what has seemed useless" to straight culture (40). Nichols remarks upon this move's importance to queer thinkers such as Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, and Heather Love, but zeroes in on Edelman's No Future (2004) for sustained dialogue that continues into chapter two. Associating James's aesthetes Roderick Hudson and Gabriel Nash with Edelman's sinthomosexual—the pleasure-seeking queer whose "embrace" of the ostensibly "useless death drive" would collapse the symbolic order and its homophobic representations—Nichols argues that "a particular kind of uselessness has been intimately linked to queer lives" since the fin-de-siècle (50, 73). By considering James's "oblique" and highly "intellectual" inflection of "the principle of art for art's sake," he registers underappreciated connections between the charges of impracticality often leveled at aesthetes and the accusations of irrelevance frequently directed at contemporary theorists (71). Chapter one might leave psychoanalytically informed readers questioning Nichols's reproduction of Edelman's assumption that the drive is completely "useless," conducing only to destroy the symbolic order without offering the possibilities for regeneration queer theorists such as Tim Dean, Teresa de Lauretis, and Mari Ruti find in it (50).1 Yet Same Old's second chapter, "Reproductive," critiques Edelman from another angle by focusing on feminist texts that undermine his characterization of "all forms of reproduction" as heteronormative (77). Drawing on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1916 Herland and late twentieth-century feminist utopian fiction by Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, Sally Miller Gearhart, and Nicola Griffith, Nichols challenges Edelman's insistence that the ideology of "reproductive futurism"—which figures "the Child as the preeminent emblem… of every political vision as a vision of futurity"—always and only reproduces a heteronormative order that queers should reject.2 Nichols is unpersuasive in attempting to exculpate Herland from charges of racism by claiming that the book imagines a universalist "dissolution of all particular racial formations into one"; even so, Gilman's "standardised and homogenised" vision remains troubling (109). Nonetheless, this chapter's overarching argument is on point. Observing that feminist utopian texts feature "non-heterosexual—and arguably...

Dis-locations and Re-locations: Christopher Isherwood and the Search for the “Home Self”

SummaryBritish expatriate writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) spent more than half his life in California. In addition to his work with the Hollywood movie studios he continued to publish novels, travel writing and four autobiographies, the last of which, My Guru and His Disciple, was published in 1980. Given the notoriety that had accrued following the publication of his earlier, “out” autobiography, Christopher and His Kind (1976), following which he was fêted as a literary standard bearer for the Gay Liberation movement, for him to provide testimony of his religious life was in direct contravention of the prevailing discourses that would cast unapologetically “queer” men as pariahs from religious communities, at least in those groups adhering to the Abrahamic lineages.The marginalisation extended into other fields, too, including psychological medicine, which interpreted sexual orientations beyond the standard binary model as pathological, examples of failure along the normatively-defined pathway of “healthy” psycho-sexual development. Worse, in this late testimonio, he was acknowledging training in an alien, Vedanta tradition which positioned him well beyond the conventional fold of the Anglican, Christian religion of his upbringing.Isherwood found his way “home” through the sincere study of the teachings of the non-dual Advaita Vedanta under the guidance of his guru – Swami Prabhavananda, of the Ramakrishna Order of monks – who presided over a temple in Hollywood, California.This article investigates how his Vedanta study, sustained over forty years, enabled Isherwood to realise a deep connection to a “home” that had less to do with geography, culture, or family ties than with a deep, internal re-orientation that shifts the notion of a personal self into a re-alignment with the unified field of consciousness that underpins all life forms.