Gay Liberation Movement Research Articles

An Obscure Form of Protest: Politicized Pleasure, Gay Liberation and Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

An Obscure Form of Protest:Politicized Pleasure, Gay Liberation and Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Mary Rizzo (bio) When Esquire magazine vocal and visible young urban gay men of the era and an older generationsteeped in homophile respectability. Cultural touchstones defined each as much as politics—and were, in fact, signs of political affiliation. As he found in his interviews, while the older generation identified with the doyennes of musical theater like Ethel Merman or Judy Garland, "Today, gay kids identify with males—with Peter Fonda, or Dustin Hoffman." Overall, theater was of little interest, especially Broadway—"Except, of course Hair."1 Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, a colorful, experimental, raucous musical revue about the lives of a group of countercultural youth written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 1967 and then moved to Broadway in April 1968. The first show to move from Off-Broadway to Broadway, it blazed the path followed by A Chorus Line and Hamilton. Hair became an immediate smash hit, with numerous touring companies playing the show around the world. By the end of its original run in 1972, approximately 20 million people worldwide, including innumerable gay men, had seen it.2 Hair drew gay fans, in part, because of its frank discussions of homosexuality. While theater became more experimental in the 1950s and 60s, Broadway musicals (with a few exceptions such as West Side Story and Cabaret) remained bastions of Americana with gentle, comedic narratives focused on heterosexual romance, offering ideology in the guise of heartfelt harmonies.3 Hair was different. Its loose plot revolved around hippie Claude's dilemma of whether to evade [End Page 5] the draft. But through its rock music score and scenes in a coffeehouse, at a party and during an LSD trip, the show depicted characters shamelessly engaging in homosexuality, bisexuality, and polyamory. Woof, one of the hippie "tribe," sings "Sodomy," in the first act in an angelic-voice, celebrating sodomy, pederasty, and fellatio, sexual acts that were banned by anti-gay laws on the books in many states. Even with this explicit embrace of gay sexuality, Hair has never been placed in the pantheon of musicals, like Gypsy or Rent, beloved by gay men. It remains unacknowledged in recent scholarly articles, monographs like D.A. Miller's lyrical meditation on gay men and musicals Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical, and in popular, grassroots historical efforts like the website Queer Music Heritage, the 2012 winner of the Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public or community-based LGBTQ history from the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History.4 More general histories of 1960s counterculture often ignore it or mention it fleetingly, with no acknowledgement of its importance within gay liberation.5 Musicologist Elizabeth Wollman offers a welcome corrective in her work on adult musicals arguing that, "like Hair, many adult musicals were ultimately used as much to educate mainstream audiences about contemporary sociosexual mores as to entertain."6 By not taking Hair seriously, critics have ignored an important source through which gay men constructed their identities and also missed how that cultural text shaped the gay liberation movement. There are several reasons for the forgetting of Hair's gay past. No character in Hair overtly proclaims a gay identity. With the gay liberation and LGBTQ rights movements from the 1970s onward, homosexuality became a politicized identity that defined a person, rather than a set of behaviors. Hair's proto-queerness meant that it was eclipsed by other musicals and plays with explicitly gay characters, like The Boys in the Band and Falsettos. Materially, after its initial run it became difficult to see. It was revived in 1977 in a disastrous production that closed within a month. Milos Forman's 1979 film Hair focused on Claude, now an Oklahoma farm boy in New York City for induction into the army, and his infatuation with rich-girl Sheila. Most references to homosexuality were eliminated. The song "Sodomy" is sung to shock Sheila and her uptight friends rather than to revel in sexual pleasure. While cast albums from the original run still circulate...

AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92

AIDS Was Our Earthquake:American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92 Gregg Drinkwater (bio) On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis Pneumonia among five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. That report is generally understood as the first official documentation of the epidemic that was briefly called "gay cancer" and then "Gay Related Immune-Deficiency" (GRID) before being labelled "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS) in the summer of 1982. By 1985, 15,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease. Nearly 13,000 of them had died.1 The majority were gay and bisexual men and intravenous (IV) drug users—all populations that were widely stigmatized at the time. From the beginning of the AIDS crisis in 1981 through 1985, American Jewish leaders were largely silent. We do not see evidence of widespread Jewish communal engagement with AIDS in the United States until September 24, 1985, when two young and charismatic rabbis in San Francisco delivered Yom Kippur sermons on AIDS in their respective Reform synagogues: Congregation Sha'ar Zahav (serving primarily LGBTQ members) and Congregation Emanu-El (with primarily straight members). Both sermons, and the rabbis who delivered them, profoundly shaped liberal American Judaism's responses to AIDS. [End Page 122] The Sha'ar Zahav sermon, delivered by Yoel Kahn, a 26-year-old gay man newly ordained as a Reform rabbi, suggested a Jewish path forward on HIV/AIDS grounded in the insights of the Gay Liberation Movement and an approach that centered gay and lesbian lives. The Emanu-El sermon, in contrast, delivered by Robert Kirschner, a 34-year-old straight man newly promoted as his congregation's senior rabbi, called upon Jewish compassion in the face of a public health crisis affecting stigmatized populations. Yet both shared common ground. Rather than framing the religious and moral issue at the heart of HIV/AIDS as a need to proscribe sexual behavior coded as dangerous and aberrant, as was common among evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish leaders, the rabbis who delivered both of these sermons reflected the emergence of a new moral calculus in which acceptance and tolerance of gay and lesbian people became a Jewish moral litmus test among liberal Jews. The Jewish AIDS initiatives that followed in the wake of the conversations these sermons helped spark were rarely about policing the sexual and intimate behavior of gay and lesbian people. Instead, most of the Jewish AIDS programs that emerged in the US in the late 1980s focused on providing support and social services to people with AIDS (hereafter PWAs) and their families; raising awareness about the risks of AIDS; making AIDS more visible in Jewish communities; and modifying the behaviors of non-gay Jews toward gay and lesbian people.2 In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, conservative American Christian religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, had insisted that AIDS was God's punishment for sinful "homosexual" behavior. A 1986 Gallup poll, five years after the AIDS crisis emerged, indicated that 42 percent of Americans agreed with him.3 Such religious bigotry in the early 1980s was one factor that gave political and cultural leaders license to minimize the threat of the disease and to openly mock those suffering from AIDS.4 Few Jewish leaders outside the ultra-Orthodox community, however, made claims about AIDS that explicitly invoked God's wrath as the cause of AIDS. One exception was the Modern Orthodox Rabbi Barry Freundel—the same rabbi who was arrested in 2014 for voyeurism at a Washington DC mikvah (ritual bath)—who wrote in a 1986 essay that—although one can cite Jewish proof texts arguing both for and against divine punishment—"[b]y far, the greater evidence indicates that God's retribution plays a role in epidemics such as AIDS." Yet even Freundel quickly dismissed the question as irrelevant to the Jewish obligation to "heal and prevent death wherever possible."5 More often, Orthodox Jewish leaders joined conservative Christians in describing AIDS as the consequence of what they saw [End Page 123] as abhorrent or even pathological behavior, although the vast majority still held that regardless of...

“Say ‘hi’ from Gaia”: women’s travel guides and lesbian feminist community formation in the pre-internet era (1975-1992)

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with the question of how American women, particularly those who identified as lesbian, questioning, or queer found information about where to locate other lesbian, questioning, or queer women in a pre-internet era. The women’s travel guide, Gaia’s Guide, communicated information about “safe” and women friendly spaces during the early to mid years of American women’s and lesbian and gay liberation movements (1975–1992). The creation of lesbian feminist communities was bolstered by the production of these guides and other women’s guidebooks; however, the guides promoted a lesbian feminist community that centered whiteness and middle-class identity. Sandy Horn’s role as editor of Gaia’s Guide influenced the representations of what was “safe,” desirable, and enticing to readers. The guides also reflected prevailing structural inequalities during the period. This article shows that the technology of the travel guides shaped lesbian feminist communities through intentional and unintentional exclusion.

A Comparative Study of Gay and Lesbian Movement in Indonesia and America for the Struggle of Equality Recognition

Abstract:Studies of sexual orientation or sexual behavior in homosexual groups have been carried out from various aspects, such as religion, health, psychology, philosophy, anthropology or law. This paper aims both on conducting studies of sexual orientation in gays and lesbians, and also in its movement. This study focuses on the comparison by discussing the history of the entry of gays and lesbians in America first. United State has made a policy with the granting of same-sex marriage rights through the 2015 Obergefell Supreme Court ruling; hence, the rejection of same-sex marriage was unconstitutional action. Churches also dare to facilitate the process of same-sex marriage, by reason of following state decisions. The LGBT movement especially gays as a pioneer called the Gay Liberation Movement has a strong influence in America in fighting for equality, and has a big contribution to the granting of the right to same-sex marriage. This right is also supplemented by adoption rights. If this condition is compared to Indonesia which has lots of similar movement and becomes one of the biggest movements in Southeast Asia, in contrast, the majority of people reject the status. Meannwhile, gays and lesbians demand on the basis of human rights protection. Related to this condition, Indonesia has different views on human rights values. Human rights have universal principles, yet the actualization of human rights can be particular. Indonesia could be like America, if there are no regulations and restrictions on gay and lesbian individuals with differences in their sexual orientation, including the and lesbian movements.Keywords: Movement, Gay, Lesbian, United State, Equality Recognition

Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular

Meeting at the Watchtower:Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular Zachary Manditch-Prottas (bio) His Goat, Our Lamb: Soul on Ice and James Baldwin as Instructive Victim In his prison-time memoir Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver, Black Power ideologue provocateur, attacked the racial authenticity and manhood of perhaps the most acclaimed and accomplished African American author of the decade, James Baldwin. Cleaver's critical aim was Baldwin's personal sexual practices and corresponding racial psychology, not his prose. Cleaver asserted that Baldwin's sexuality was, in essence, the manifestation of a "racial death-wish" (101). He argued that Baldwin's sexuality was a concession of his black manhood and signaled his engagement in an unachievable attempt to "becom[e] a white man in a black body" (103). Baldwin stood as the formative example of an evidential link between black male homosexuality and interracial homosocial obedience; a type of "succumb[ing] psychologically" (135) that manifested not solely as an involuntarily induced psychic condition but also as a literal act of masochistic interracial submission. Soul on Ice has acquired an infamous canonical status in African American letters as the era's most candid and illustrative declaration of the phallocentric interplay of racial and sexual politics. Cleaver's attack on James Baldwin is the most notorious and frequently cited example of homophobia in the Black Power era. The essay "Notes on a Native Son," in which Cleaver addresses Baldwin, has emerged in particular as ground zero terrain for considerations of black gay men as, to borrow a phrase from Robert Reid-Pharr, intraracial abject "scapegoat[s]" (603): those sacrificed in efforts to stabilize heterosexual black masculine subjectivity and prospective nationalist collectivity. Following this reasoning, Baldwin has served as the iconic embodiment of an internal racial boundary that at once threatened and fortified the union of heterosexuality with authentic black masculinity. Marlon Ross has suggested that the consistent centering of Cleaver's lambasting of Baldwin has overdetermined the perception of Black Power as unequivocally coupled with openly homophobic masculine posturing ("White Fantasies"). I agree with Ross that Cleaver's position on homosexuality and his focus on Baldwin to illustrate his position has significantly, and unfairly, saturated scholarly consideration of the relationship between masculinity and the Black Power ethos. A significant consequence of Ross's proposition is that Baldwin has been repeatedly victimized through persistent reproductions of the terms of Cleaver's discourse. In this respect, in critical evaluations of Cleaver's position, Baldwin's subjectivity is ironically and repeatedly usurped by those very sexualized terms of discourse that are being interrogated. In the context of Ross's argument, he suggests that centering Huey Newton's speech "On the Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements" would make for a vastly different narrative of Black Power, masculinity, and sexuality. In matters of gender and sexual progressiveness, Newton rightfully stands as Cleaver's epochal [End Page 179] opposite. Newton's evolution and public disavowal of homophobia and sexism is largely credited to the influence of James Baldwin as well as Jean Genet. It is notable, however, that Newton's 1973 essay, "Eldridge Cleaver, He Is No James Baldwin," can be read as the pioneering work in the now-familiar positioning of Baldwin as victim to interrogate Cleaver's homophobia and sexism and to question his sexuality. Newton's essay, while in fact quite deft in much of its psychoanalytic reading of Soul on Ice, functions largely as a curious piece of popular archival gossip. The most widely mentioned, but rarely closely considered, element of the essay is Newton's claim that in 1967, shortly after the publication of Soul on Ice, he saw Baldwin and Cleaver share an erotic kiss. Whether the story is true or revealing of Cleaver's "true" sexual identity is beside my point here. Newton's story is noteworthy because he uses Baldwin, whose privacy is presumably of no concern as he is, in Newton's words, "an admitted homosexual," as corporeal evidence of Cleaver's mindset and suppressed identity. Newton suggests that Baldwin kissed Cleaver to "expose" Cleaver. Of the kiss, Newton concludes that Baldwin, "who had neither written nor uttered a...

Queering the Panthers: Rhetorical Adjacency and Black/Queer Liberation Politics

Abstract Using Stonewall as an anchor point, this article charts the coterminous relationship between the black liberation movement and the gay liberation movement with special emphasis on the relationship between the Black Panther Party and the Gay Liberation Front. It begins with an assessment of the political and social context of 1969 to discuss the importance of rhetorical adjacency in the collaboration between the movements. Rhetorical adjacency describes how movements borrow and share political frameworks, movement goals, terminology, and spatial sensibility as they navigate points of ideological contention, especially around identity issues. The rhetorical adjacency of these two movements is complicated by the early critiques of the gender politics of the Panthers, which the first section takes up at length. Then, the article turns to critiques of policing, imprisonment, capitalism, and colonialism absorbed and redeployed by the gay liberation movement from the black liberation movement to understand how activists during and after Stonewall conceptualized police power, resistance, and movement strategy. The article concludes with a discussion of the Black Panther Party Chairman Huey Newton’s rhetorical defense of gay liberation as a revolutionary perspective in the wake of Stonewall to understand how and why the Panthers saw promise in intentional adjacency with gay liberation activists as well as to demonstrate why gay liberation activists praised Newton and collaborated with the Panthers. The rhetorical adjacency between the organizations amplified radical black and gay movement politics, circulating rhetorical tropes that continued to mobilize activism.

Gay Life and Liberation, a Photographic Record of 1970s Belfast

In March 2017, the first LGBTQ+ history exhibition to be displayed at a national museum in Northern Ireland debuted at the Ulster Museum. The exhibition, entitled “Gay Life and Liberation: A Photographic Exhibition of 1970s Belfast,” included private photographs captured by Doug Sobey, a founding member of gay liberation organizations in Belfast during the 1970s, and featured excerpts from oral histories with gay and lesbian activists. It portrayed the emergence of the gay liberation movement during the Troubles and how the unique social, political, and religious situation in Northern Ireland fundamentally shaped the establishment of a gay identity and community in the 1970s. By displaying private photographs and personal histories, it revealed the hidden history of the LGBTQ+ community to the museum-going public. The exhibition also enhanced and extended the histories of the Troubles, challenging traditional assumptions and perceptions of the conflict.

Creating an embodied queer Judaism: liturgy, ritual and sexuality at San Francisco’s Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 1977–1987

ABSTRACTGay and lesbian synagogues, unique to the American religious landscape, first appeared in the early 1970s. At the height of the gay synagogue movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, over two dozen such congregations met the spiritual needs of gay and lesbian Jews across the United States. As they grew and expanded, these synagogues incubated a new “queer Judaism” centred on innovative rituals, liturgy, and embodied practices grounded in gay and lesbian (and later, also bisexual and transgender) experiences. In this essay, I offer a 10-year case study of the development of queer Judaism at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav (CSZ), San Francisco’s gay and lesbian synagogue, founded in 1977. Within the landscape of gay and lesbian synagogues, CSZ stands out for being founded in San Francisco when that city was the capital of American gay culture. Inspired by the Gay Liberation Movement and the flowering of grassroots Jewish community organizing in the late 1960s and 1970s, the founders of CSZ asserted a right to difference, building and promoting links between Judaism, sexuality, gender, and identity. In this context, CSZ helped build a queer, sex-positive Judaism that celebrated and politicized sexual minorities, created new forms of chosen family, and fostered an ethic of egalitarian and lay-led inclusiveness.

‘In this house we believe in fairness and kindness’: Post-liberation politics in Australia's same-sex marriage postal survey

In December 2017, Australia legalized same-sex marriage (SSM), following a 13-year ban and a drawn-out postal survey on marriage equality that saw campaigners mobilize for a ‘Yes’ vote on a non-binding poll. Through a discourse analysis of the Yes and No campaigns’ television and online video advertisements, we demonstrate how the Yes campaign was symptomatic of what we call a ‘post-liberation’ approach that saw SSM as the last major hurdle for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) politics. While the No campaign linked SSM to gender fluidity, transgender identity, and sex education programmes, in contrast the Yes campaign limited itself to narratives around love and marriage. In not attending to the link between sex, gender and sexuality, the Yes campaign narrowed the possibilities of the debate, preserving existing White heteronormative expectations of gender and sexuality. We contrast the debate that unfolded during the postal survey to the Australian Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s, the latter of which was able to successfully and radically challenge similarly homophobic campaigns. Rather than relying on ‘palatable’ or mainstream ideas of equality, love and fairness, Gay Liberation in Australia embraced the radical potential of LGBTIQ activism and presented a utopian, optimistic vision of a transformed future. Here we suggest that we can learn from the history of campaigns around sexuality, to understand what was ‘won’ in the SSM debate, and to better develop strategies for change in the future.

Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s by Katie Batza

Reviewed by: Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s by Katie Batza Brett C. Stockdill Katie Batza. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s. Politics and Culture in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. xii + 178 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-8122-5013-8). Before AIDS cogently analyzes 1970s’ gay health activism—primarily among affluent white gay men—in the United States. Using archival research and interviews, Katie Batza challenges the narrative that gay health services emerged during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Simultaneously, her findings counter the portrayal of gay men in the 1970s as focused solely on sexual freedom; they also sought sexual health. The medical infrastructure developed in the 1970s proved indispensable in responding to the AIDS crisis. Batza chronicles how radical social movements inspired activists to reimagine the meaning of gay health. In turn, interactions with the state led to both the expansion and the deradicalization of gay clinics. The book is organized thematically, with each chapter comparing and contrasting how these key themes played out at Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic, Chicago’s Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, and Los Angeles’ Gay Community Services Center. Medical homophobia marred gay men’s health care in the 1960s and 1970s. Doctor’s visits “often led to misdiagnosis, judgment, ostracism, and treatment for their sexuality rather than their medical ailments” (p. 1). Coupled with the threat of violations of confidentiality that risked family abandonment, job loss, eviction, and so forth, homophobia often caused gay men to delay or avoid medical care. Within this context, gay men (and lesbians) took collective action to forge accessible, gay-positive STI (sexually transmitted infection) testing clinics, outreach and testing in bars and bathhouses, primary care, research, and other services. Radical social movements, local political contexts, and Great Society funding catalyzed the clinics’ formation. The dynamic milieu of the black power, antiwar, feminist, gay liberation, and other movements provided ideological and strategic models for gay health activists. A Black Panther Party clinic inspired former antiwar activists to start the Fenway clinic as part of a broader antigentrification campaign. Medical students and doctors radicalized by the antiwar movement and frustrated with homophobic medical training and care established Howard Brown. Los Angeles clinic organizers more explicitly employed gay liberation politics, promoting the concept of “oppression sickness”—“the ways in which homophobia literally made gay people sick” (p. 25). Framing oppression—not homosexuality—as pathological was integral in shifting from a medical model to a health justice model in all three clinics. Sex positivity, paired with gay cultural expertise (e.g., use of nonclinical language such as “rimming”), garnered trust among patients. Health care access expanded and improved greatly by the end of the decade. Gay health activists took advantage of Great Society (and other) grant funding. Research collaborations, professional organizations, and relationships with government agencies led to a better understanding of gay health for both health care providers and gay patients. State funding fostered the growth of the clinics, but compliance with government laws and regulations also impeded efforts to fight oppression. Ideological rifts around bureaucratization and professionalization [End Page 292] developed within the Los Angeles and Boston clinics between those committed to social justice activism and those committed to service provision. Sexism pervaded the clinics. Male activists drew upon feminist critiques of mainstream medicine, but typically dismissed lesbians’ health needs. Radical gay men and lesbians often left the clinics or were pushed out. By 1980, the clinics had shifted from volunteer-run collectives fighting “oppression sickness” to hierarchical bureaucracies with million-dollar budgets providing more narrowly defined medical care. Batza challenges the common AIDS narrative depicting gay men as pathologically hypersexual and hedonistic in the 1970s. She documents gay men’s collective efforts to fight homophobia and improve health care. Batza also argues that contrary to the common “AIDS abandonment narrative”—in which state abandonment gave rise to oppositional health activism—gay health activism was enmeshed with the state. The state provided resources instrumental to the growth of gay health care. In turn, the national gay health infrastructure created in the 1970s immediately responded to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, providing frontline education, prevention, testing, medical care...

Promiscuous versus Romantic Lesbianism in Films

There is a lack of queer visibility in the mainstream Hollywood films because of the Production Code Administration in October 1961 that prohibited the presentation of “sexual perversion” on screen. However, the amendment of this code and gay liberation movements in 1970s, and the era of “new queer cinema” in the 1990s increased media representations of sexual minorities. Based on this context, the article critically analyzes the depiction of lesbian characters and their romance in the films The Killing of Sister George (1968) and Blue is the Warmest Color (2013). The Killing of Sister George depicts the life story of June Buckridge who loses her career and her relationship due to her sexuality, and Blue is the Warmest Color is a story about Adele, who explores her sexuality as a teenager. Whereas the former film depicts lesbianism from a promiscuous lens, the latter approaches this topic from a realistic and contemporary perspective. Thus, the films represent lesbian sexuality in unique ways that allows us to investigate the progression of queer depiction in the mainstream cinema. The similarities and differences between the queer representation in the films, as well as the way the film portrayal of lesbian romance relate to the current research literature are discussed.

Editorial Focus of the Gay Magazine <i>Badi</i> and Its Attempt of Reshaping Gay Male Identity in Japan

This paper examines how the editorial focus of the Japanese gay magazine Badi has shifted over time and how the magazine has shaped the identity of gay men in Japan. Badi is the most popular magazine for gay men in Japan today. Its creation in 1993 coincided with a period of marked change in Japanese society regarding views toward homosexuality as well as with several watershed events such as in 1991 when homophobia was first addressed in a Japanese court and in 1994 when the first pride parade was held in Tokyo. By examining Badi as part of the Japanese gay liberation movement of the 1990s, and dividing the magazine’s editorial run into four distinct periods, we show that although the editors shaped the new identity and lifestyle, they were bolstered by masculinity.

Queer reproductive justice?

In the past half-century, there have been some notable shifts in English language feminist and queer scholarship and activism about procreation, marriage and family. In particular, there has been a striking increase in emphasis on genetic and biological family creation in queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender kinship practices, in contradistinction to earlier emphases on escape from the norms and demands of heteronormative patriarchy. During the gay liberation movement, older concepts of ‘families we choose’ were not defined by (nor meant necessarily to include) the creation of children as kin. The contemporary shift transpires amidst racial, national and economic disparities around the ability of people to ‘couple’ or to access reproductive technology. In line with early feminist and queer studies, this commentary calls for a broadening of the view of reproduction, and for more direct engagement between the primarily critical discourse on reproductive justice and the frequently celebratory discourse on queer families.

Queer Radio History: Pacifica Radio

Pacifica Radio was the first listener-sponsored non-commercial radio network in the United States to air queer voices beginning with Allen Ginsberg reading his iconic poem, Howl on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California in 1956. From that broadcast, Pacifica stations KPFK-FM (LA), WBAI-FM (NYC), KPFT-FM (Houston), and WPFW-FM (Washington, D.C.) have consistently given space to the LGBTQI community and perspective over 60 years, creating a vibrant recorded history relatively unknown and vastly under-researched.What survives of the broadcasts are largely found in the Pacifica Radio Archives (and other repositories) and documented in the printed station program folio guides (1949–2005) and consumer catalogues.This article explores the importance of Pacifica’s queer sound and print archive and looks to identify what survives and what has been lost. It also highlights the many ways the queer story was expressed; bearing witness to the Gay Liberation movement through reportage, literature, poetry, radio drama, music, interviews, live event coverage, documentaries, docudramas, listener call-ins, and group discussions. The author presents this article to bring awareness to these rare instances and help motivate their preservation and access for extended scholarly use.

“THE BRIDES OF DECONSTRUCTION AND CRITICISM” AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF FEMINISM IN THE NORTH AMERICAN ACADEMY

“The Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism,” an informal group of feminist literary critics active at Yale University during the 1970s, were inspired by second-wave feminist curriculum, activities, and thought, as well as by the politics of the women's and gay liberation movements, in their effort to intervene into patterns of female effacement and marginalization. By the early 1980s, while helping direct deconstructive reading away from the self-subversiveness of French and English prose and poetry, the Brides made groundbreaking contributions to—and in several cases founded—fields of scholarly inquiry. During the late 1980s, these feminist deconstructionists, having overcome resistance from within Yale's English Department and elsewhere, used their works as social and political acts to help pave the way for the successes of cultural studies in the North American academy. Far from a supplément to what Barbara Johnson boldly called the “Male School,” the Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism arguably were the Yale school. Examining the distinct but interrelated projects of Yale's feminist deconstructive moment and how local and contingent events as well as the national climate, rather than the importation of so-called French theory, informed this moment gives us a clearer rendering of the story of deconstruction.

When Memory and Sexuality Collide: The Homosentimental Style of Gay Liberation

Abstract Commemorating both the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the subsequent Gay Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Monument projects a quiet, muted homosexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the courageous and violent assertion of homosexual identity that was Stonewall. Our essay examines this strange incongruity, revealing in the process the homosentimental style—a unique rhetorical form that attempts to negotiate the many contradictory motives animating LGBT advocacy. The Gay Liberation Monument’s use of homosentimentality refracts in many directions, simultaneously challenging dehumanizing rhetorics with affective appeals to care and friendship, presenting itself as assimilationist even as it offers coded indices of clone culture, and producing a doubled homosexual body—at once assimilationist and queer. Both the monument and the homosentimental style thus pose a challenge to binary conceptualizations of LGBT rights advocacy that separate assimilationist and queer politics.

“All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons”: Gay Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and Intercommunal Efforts Against Police Brutality in the Bay Area

This article shows how the path of the gay liberation movement in the Bay Area was shaped by its relationship to the Black Panther Party (BPP). Previous scholarship has made frequent but brief mention of the connections between the two. However, the Black Panther Party had a greater depth of contact with and longer lasting influence on gay liberation than previously acknowledged, as an examination of movement activism in the Bay Area reveals. Perhaps the central issue of cooperation between gay liberation and the BPP—police brutality—has received little mention. Emerging scholarship is seeking to place LGBT activists in the larger movement against police brutality, and understanding their relationship to the Panthers will be crucial to doing so. While a great range of viewpoints on alliances between the Panthers and gay liberation could be observed in both camps in 1969–1970, many gay activists affirmed a united front even before Newton’s statement on gay liberation. Foremost among the reasons for working together was their shared identity as criminalized groups and their shared goal of combating police brutality. Gay liberationists modeled Panther approaches to dealing with police violence, both in armed self-defense and electoral politics, marking a clear break with homophile reformism. In the spring of 1971, both became more moderate and continued along the same path independently, with the issue of police brutality remaining central. This work encourages readers to consider in greater depth the intersection of gay liberation and Black Power, as well as social movements more generally.

The Scarlet Professor as Spectacle: Responding to the Opera from a Queer Studies Perspective

<i>The Scarlet Professor</i> as Spectacle: Responding to the Opera from a Queer Studies Perspective

Envisioning Queer Liberation: The Performance of Communal Visibility in Doric Wilson’s Street Theater

Doric Wilson’s 1982 comedy Street Theater is one of the most enduring plays to emerge from the gay theatre movement, and this article argues for its significance as a pioneering work that represents the Stonewall Riots and the theatre itself as sites for the creation of queer community. Building on Jill Dolan’s theorization of the utopian performative and communitas, I examine how Wilson combined the ethos of off-off-Broadway and the activism of the gay liberation movement to create theatre by, for, about, and near LGBT people. With archival research supporting dramaturgical analysis of the play, the article demonstrates how Street Theater perpetuated the mission of Wilson’s ground-breaking theatre company, TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), gained acclaim for a production staged in a gay leather bar, became a staple of the “purple circuit,” and continues to promote the re-enactment of queer communal visibility.

Beyond Refusal: Queer Transpacific Feminism During the Vietnam War

This article illuminates the fugitive queer of colour history of the Indochinese Women’s Conferences in Canada in 1971, particularly the Southeast Asian delegates’ impromptu protest against white lesbian inquiries and the subsequent removal of lesbian workshops at the conference. Rather than assimilating this moment into a homonationalist historiography of perversely homophobic Asians, this article traces how the lesbian and gay liberation movements in the white Global North monopolized the political meanings of queerness and freedom in the 1970s. The Southeast Asian delegates’ decision to disengage from the topics forwarded by white lesbians suggests not their homophobia, but a contradiction within the meaning of queerness that emerges in the chaos of a race war. This article navigates through these logics, which critically make queer Asian women’s desires impossible. I employ the concept of refusal to discuss a specific site of queer Asian feminism, one that responds to the sexualized trauma of war and peace, as well as to the white Global North gay and lesbian activism that emerged in the same moment. Indeed, while refusal may imply replacing information with absence, the delegates’ refusal critically communicated the exploitative nature of white lesbian feminism and its unexpected affinities with heteropatriarchal Cold War militarism. Seriously considering the delegates’ insights into their multiple marginalizations within a transpacific economy, and the way they actively shaped how others should understand these experiences of violence, this article argues that this moment ushered in a prescient and innovative critique of queer Asian feminist formations in Canada.