Gay Liberation Research Articles

The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions

The Life, After Death, of Postmodern Emotions Steven Shaviro 1. To the best of my knowledge, Andy Warhol never used the word postmodern. Nonetheless, he anticipated, and indeed helped to create, much of what we now mean by that word. In the 1960s, and until his death in 1987, Warhol manufactured a style and a sensibility. It's something he picked up from the culture around him, transmuted in the social and artistic laboratory that he called the Factory, and transmitted back to American culture at large. For this reason, Warhol and his work have an exemplary status, even a privileged one, when it comes to looking at the changes American culture underwent during the second half of the twentieth century. In what follows, I look at the meaning, or the redefinition, of emotion in the postmodern world. I do this, however, not by generalizing from Warhol as a particular case but by looking at him as closely as possible, in his singularity (which in part also means his queerness), and by constructing a narrative about how that singularity has become for us, today, a cultural "universal." 2. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Warhol tells the following story: "During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's what more or less has happened to me. I don't really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the 60s I never thought in terms of 'love' again."1 3. What happened during the 1960s? Who is to blame (or credit) for this state of affairs? Who killed the emotions that we used to think were real? Of course, the 1960s were a time of massive change, in America and in [End Page 125] other parts of the world as well. In the United States it was the period of the civil rights movement, the women's and gay liberation movements, and the antiwar and anticolonialist movement, together with sweeping changes in sexual and domestic mores. As if to mirror these changes, right-wing social commentators still blame the decade for an alleged decline in social cohesiveness and values. The 1960s were also the time when Andy Warhol himself moved from being a commercial illustrator to being a world-class artist. The social scene around Warhol's Factory at the time is often taken to exemplify the excesses (for good or ill) of the decade. 4. But Warhol doesn't mention any of this in his story of the death of his emotions. Rather, he fingers technology as the culprit. He says that television and the tape recorder did it. "When I got my first TV set," he writes, "I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people." Even more, he continues, "the acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had." And he adds that he considers this a good thing: "I was glad to see it go."2 5. Warhol's account of the loss of his emotional life—leaving aside his sense of satisfaction at the prospect—has since become a commonplace in discussions of postmodern culture. Thus J. G. Ballard writes of "the death of affect" under the influence of the last century's new technologies and media.3 In a somewhat different way, Fredric Jameson also posits "the waning of affect" in postmodernism.4 And of course, Jean Baudrillard's work is all about how "the cool universe of digitality" has eclipsed the real, "the 'cool' cybernetic phase supplanting the 'hot' and phantasmatic."5 The argument goes something like this: Thanks to the new electronic technologies, the world has become a single global marketplace. Universal commodity fetishism has colonized lived experience. The real has been murdered by its representations. Every object has been absorbed into its own image. There is no longer (if there ever was) any such thing as a single, stable self. Subjectivity has broken into multiple fragments, and the high modernist endeavor to totalize these...

"Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?" Gay Culture and Activism in the Rose City between World War II and Stonewall

PeterBoag "Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?" GayCulture andActivism inthe Rose City between World War II andStonewall In the april 1972 edition of the Fountain, Portland's first gay and lesbian newspaper, George Nichols, a local activist, reflected on the recent successful political organizing done among gays and lesbians in Seattle while lamenting the lack of such progress in the Rose City. "Those who are discouraged by the difficulties of the gaymove ment" in Portland, Nichols began, "will do well to take a lesson from our neighboring Seattle." Despite its "crippling depression," he observed, Se attle "has no less than 8 groups and institutions serving the gay commu nity. ... All of them manage towork together to some extent." In conclu sion,Nichols confessed that he and other activists inPortland had spent "a lot of time trying to figure out why the gay movement isn't functioning better in our city" and called upon readers to bury their excuses and look to Seattle as amodel on how tomake things happen.1 Nichols's observations about Seattle and Portland also would have been true as early as 1959,when lesbians and gays in the Puget Sound area, at some public level, had been reaching out, organizing, and pushing for recognition and rights. Those who lived in Portland had remained, for the most part, inactive until about 1970, despite having had critical opportu nities in both the 1950s and 1960s to plead more vociferously their case Research for thisarticlewas supported by theOregon Historical Society'sDonald J. Sterling, Jr., Memorial Senior Research Fellowship. 6 OHQ VOL. IO5, NO. 1 ? 2004 Oregon Historical Society TheHarbor Club (lowerright) on Southwest First Avenue inPortlandwas one of the fewgay bars in the cityfrom the late 1940s, when thisphotograph was taken, until city officials succeeded in closing itdown in 1965. Because of its reputation, soon after it opened the U.S. Navy declared the Harbor Club offlimitstosailors. before a broad public audience. As a result, by the time of New York's Stonewall riot on June 28,1969 ? an event that historians point to as the birth of themodern gay liberation movement nationwide ? Seattle gays and lesbians had a considerable head start over those in the Rose City. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that gays and lesbians in Seattle would also realize some of their civil rights at themunicipal level at a consider ably earlier date than those in Portland did. In September 1973, for ex ample, without much hesitancy, Seattle became the firstmajor American city to ban discrimination against lesbians and gays in both municipal and private employment within the city's boundaries. Meanwhile, the Portland City Council delayed on a far less extensive measure and did not secure an ordinance that protected gays inmunicipal employment until a year later, inDecember 1974. Mayor Neil Goldschmidt and Commissioners Connie McCready and Charles Jordon passed the Portland ordinance over Boag, "Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?" the protests of Commissioners Mildred Schwab and Francis Ivancie, who had thrown up obstacles to the proposal formore than a year. Itwas not until the fall of 1991, eighteen years after Seattle's ordinance was on the books, that the Portland City Council finally extended protections to les bians and gays in the city's places of private employment.2 Some historians argue that "modern" ? that is,post-1969 ? gay rights activismdid not suddenlyspringforthfromtheStonewalluprisingbut, rather, built on the "homophile movement" that had commenced in 1951. Others stress that the lesbian and gay bar cultures that were forged in America's large cities between the 1930s and 1960s produced a political consciousness thatwas readily transformed into a broader activism out side formal homophile organizations in the socially heady times of the early 1960s, some years before the Stonewall riot. Still others maintain that the 1950s and 1960s homophile organizations depended on bar pa trons for the rank and file of their organizations.3 All three explanations can help us understand not only what happened in Portland and Seattle but also why the history of lesbian and gay rights activism in the two urban centers was so different. Unlike Seattle, Portland had no organized homophile movement in the 1950s and 1960s; and when the gay...

Fighting to Become Jews

Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America. By Michael Staub. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 386 pages. $29.50 (cloth). MICHAEL STAUB'S TORN AT THE ROOTS MODESTLY CALLS ITSELF A STUDY OF THE "crisis of Jewish liberalism" but really encompasses so much more than that. Published at the same time that Camp David and Oslo devolved into the second Intifidah and increased Israeli aggression against Palestinians, and as the United States' government prepared to make war against Saddam Hussein for the second time, Staub's work stands, ultimately, as a melancholy account of a time in the relatively recent past when official and semi-official representatives of American Jewry took a surprising number of positions on the issues of the day, positions that in our own moment might strike many of us as refreshingly unorthodox and unpredictable. In a moment when it has become harder and harder to speak in public both as a lover of Jewish culture (and Jewish people) and also as a critic of Israel, Staub's book brings us back to a time when such a combination would have been entirely common—when, in fact, a person could have found mainstream organizations to join (including synagogues), petitions to sign, protests to march in, that would support just such a position. Staub's characters are liberals for many reasons. Some found the rationale for their political activity in doctrinal teachings—in a rediscovered (or newly invented) "prophetic tradition" for instance. Many others rooted their liberalism [End Page 277] in a more secular idea of Jewish identity, an idea that might include a hint of Biblical justification but that ultimately rested on a post-Enlightenment sense of Jewish peoplehood and mission. Staub demonstrates convincingly in Torn at the Roots that the story of liberalism in American Jewish life after 1945 can, in many ways, be seen as a fifty-year discussion about the meaning of the Holocaust for American Jews. Arguing with the conventional wisdom that American Jews did not really start to discuss the Holocaust publicly until after the Eichmann trial, Staub shows how Holocaust consciousness became the "lingua franca of intracommunal contest" (17) in the postwar years. In a far-ranging set of investigations that follows this insight, Staub is able to show how American Jewish debates on Zionism, desegregation, Vietnam, Black Power, Palestine, feminism, and gay liberation all were shaped by a concern with the legacy of the Nazi genocide. While the ultimate meanings of the Holocaust remained fluid in these years, Staub deftly sketches two basic constituencies in the debate. On the one hand are those who take the evidence of the Holocaust as a demand for a narrowing of Jewish concerns around only those issues that directly touch on Jewishness and Judaism; on the other hand are the many who see the Holocaust as a call for "multi-particularism" (a term Staub borrows from Arthur Waskow [155])—a turning outwards to activism and alliance. The general trajectory of Torn at the Roots takes us from a time when the multi-particularists were in ascendance, up until the late 1970s when, as Staub sees it, the inward looking, anti-liberals won the day. Torn at the Roots recuperates a time in the very recent past (a time that has, it seems, largely disappeared from our historical record and our cultural consciousness) when American Jewish identity was defined for many individuals as constructed by ambivalence, bricolage, and nonconformity. If Staub is right, that time is passed and this is something to mourn. Towards the very end of the book Staub quotes anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff on the meanings of intracommunal fighting. Fighting, says Myerhoff, "is a partnership, requiring cooperation. A boundary-maintaining mechanism—for strangers cannot participate fully—it is also above all a proudly sociable activity" (308). Staub adapts Randolph Bourne's dictum that says, "war is the health of the state" to now read, "arguing is the health of the Jews." But, according to Staub, the shared...

How sex changed: a history of transsexuality in the United States

How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all. From early 20th-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral and medical beliefs over the 20th century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate story that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender and sexuality today.

Bisexuality

In this paper I explore the emergence of two distinct Western cultures, gay and straight, emerging in the late 19th century and then developing through the first half of the 20th century until gay liberation in the late 1960s when the establishment of gay and lesbian “ethnic style” communities strengthened the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy. I argue that the establishment of these two separate and recognisable cultures problematises social and cultural identities for those who are neither exclusively gay nor exclusively straight as well as those for whom desire is not primarily determined by gender. Moreover, challenges to the seeming naturalness of this dichotomy, primarily through poststructural queer theory and bisexuality, are met with resistance from both gay and straight communities. The tensions of trying to live bisexual lives between cultures for ordinary men often lead to a choice of attachment to either gay or straight culture and consequent silencing of bisexual desire. To illustrate my argument, in terms of negotiating lives between two cultures, I will use selected stories from my PhD research on men who have sex with men.

Never going back: a history of queer activism in Canada

Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada is the first comprehensive history of its kind. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with leading gay and lesbian activists across the country and a rich array of archival material, Tom Warner chronicles and analyzes the multiple - and often conflicting - objectives of a tumultuous grassroots struggle for sexual liberation, legislated equality, and fundamental social change. Warner presents the history of lesbian and gay liberation in a Canadian context, telling in the process the story of a remarkable movement and the people who made it happen. His history encompasses efforts to attain legislated human rights for gays and lesbians, significant regional histories, autonomous lesbian organizing, and the histories of lesbians and gays of colour, two-spirited people, and those living outside the urban mainstream of lesbian and gay life. It also recalls the crises confronting the movement: the backlash against queer activism from social conservative 'family values' campaigns, state and police harassment, and the exigencies of responding to AIDS. Moving beyond the discussions of equality-rights campaigns, Never Going Back delves inside the movement to look at dissent and debates over liberation and assimilation, sexual expression, race, the age of consent, pornography, censorship, community standards, and an identity forged from a common sexual orientation.

Desire Lines: ‘Queering’ Health and Social Welfare

This article considers how knowledge about lesbians and gay men is produced in health and social welfare texts. It looks at the consequences of a reliance upon the liberal ‘ethnic model’ of sexuality. The authors provide a critique of ‘anti-discriminatory practice’ versions of sexuality categories which, in their view, assert the liberal model at the expense of ideas found in the sociological traditions of gay liberation, lesbian feminist, interactionist and queer/postmodern theories. Through a queer reading of health and social welfare texts specifically addressed to sexuality, the article considers the hierarchy of sexual knowledges which promote heteronormativity; the reliance upon fixed identity models of sexuality; the functionalist view of a “gay culture”; the silencing of lesbian feminism; and the traditionally gendered and fetishistic versions of ‘the lesbian’ produced. The authors argue against merely ‘adding in’ lesbians and gay men, and in terms of practice, encourage a reflexive engagement by all practitioners with the ways in which these dominant discourses concerning sexuality populate and discipline knowledges within health and social welfare.

The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Politics in Britain

This article compares and contrasts the two major periods of mobilisation around the issue of sexuality that have occurred in Britain. These are the explosions of activity occurring during the 1970s promoted by the Gay Liberation Front and other groups and those occurring in the late 1980s and 1990s promoted by OutRage and other groups. The article shows how these two periods of mobilisation were characterised by considerable differences in terms of values, strategy and organisation. In seeking to explain these changes, the article draws upon diverse ideas in movement theory. In particular, it highlights the notions of frames, networks and incentives as key concepts when trying to explain movement change over long periods of time.

Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994 (review)

Reviewed by: Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994 Susan Kathleen Freeman Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994. By Elizabeth A. Armstrong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xix + 272. $60.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). In Forging Gay Identities, Elizabeth Armstrong narrates and conceptualizes the shift from homophile organizing to gay liberation to a gay identity-based movement during the second half of the twentieth century. Using primary and secondary sources, Armstrong addresses her work to sociologists interested in social movements and social change. Her analysis of San Francisco's gay movement serves to revise existing theories of organizational sociology, political process/resource mobilization theory, and new social movement theory. Although mostly derived from existing historical research and interpretations, the book offers an analytical perspective that is distinctive. From the vantage point of the turn of the twenty-first century, Armstrong demonstrates how the gay movement came to focus on identity and valorize individual expression. As displayed since the 1970s in the ubiquitous gay pride parades, the process of "coming out" has brought together a heterogeneous population to celebrate various identities and lifestyles, more recently including bisexual and transgender along with gay and lesbian. Whereas ideological, gender, race, and class differences have fragmented other recent social movements, the success story of organizers' unification of the gay movement around gay identity and visibility is the central focus of this book. Armstrong self-consciously departs from the sociological tradition of evaluating movement outcomes in terms of formal political gains and institutionalization; rather, she examines the informal realm of identity and culture while tracing the growth of the gay movement in San Francisco. [End Page 637] After laying out her theoretical premises in chapter 1, the author proceeds chronologically to demonstrate the often overlapping transitions from a homophile ("interest group") logic in the 1950s and 1960s to a short-lived revolutionary ("redistributive") logic in the late 1960s and early 1970s to a visibility ("identity") logic from the 1970s to the 1990s. She illustrates her model with original quantitative data compiled from resource guides and directories, using several charts and graphs to display her information on organizational growth and decline; on the whole, however, this is a qualitative study that draws from movement periodicals and scholarly research. Historians will not find much new empirical information, and even the differences in argument are often slight. John D'Emilio's research on the homophile movement and San Francisco gay liberation is much in evidence. Armstrong concurs with D'Emilio that the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s solidified a concept of collective identity among homosexuals. (See John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 [Chicago, 1983].) Yet she conceptualizes the emergence of a gay identity as a definitive point in the creation of a gay/lesbian "field," her terminology for the process of "creating and expanding gay social and political space" (13). While sensitive to the political and cultural climate and change over time, Armstrong nevertheless reiterates throughout the book that the homophile movement adopted a "limited" interest group model (41). Although homophile groups did resemble interest groups in several respects, electoral and legal battles for homosexual rights were only part of the homophile agenda. Just as significant but largely neglected by the author were education (of professionals and other homosexuals) and ending social isolation. Political action—pursuing the right to congregate, publish newsletters, and secure telephone directory listings—was a means to an end, not the end in itself, and this Armstrong recognizes. Yet closer attention to a wider range of activities and evidence might have led the author to less reductive conclusions about homophile politics. Whereas homophiles "could not take that final step" (56) toward publicly announcing their sexual orientation, gay liberation activists did. New Left-influenced radicalism and notions of authenticity, Armstrong argues, contributed redistributive and identity-politics logic to the movement a full year before New York City's 1969 Stonewall Riots. Unlike gay movement scholars who treat the New Left as a context for the emergence of revolutionary ideas and militant action, Armstrong views the New Left as responsible for...

The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (review)

The past five years or so have witnessed a spate of books assessing the state of the lesbian and gay movement since the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, when a group of drag queens and young homosexual blacks and Latinos resisted a routine bar raid to launch the gay liberation movement. Perhaps due to a beginning-of-the-millennium need to "take stock" or to the gay liberation generation reaching middle age, these books have all argued that something significant has happened to the movement, the community, the subculture, and the dominant culture in the thirty-odd years since Stonewall.

The Silence Is Broken: A History of the First Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Student Groups

The story sounds familiar: following a 1969 confrontation in New York, a small group of self-identified lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and their supporters created a militant gay rights organization in the United States, one that would help foster the gay liberation movement. However, the indi? viduals involved in this group were not residents of New York City but students at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the confrontation was not the riot of working-class black and Latino drag queens at the Stone? wall Inn in Greenwich Village but the takeover by African American stu? dents of Willard Straight Hall, Cornell's campus union. Nor did the group, the Student Homophile League (SHL), begin in the wake of Stonewall; rather, it was formed in 1968, making it the second gay rights group to be organized on a college campus, after Columbia University's Student Ho? mophile League, of which the Cornell group was initially a chapter.1 While Stonewall served as a main catalyst for the rise ofa new era in the struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, the preceding gay activism at Columbia, Cornell, and a handful of other universities played a critical role in laying the groundwork that would enable a militant movement to emerge following the riots. Not only did the stu? dent groups take the lead in asserting a sense of pride in being gay, but,

PAUL ET AL. RESPOND

We are gratified to note that Mathy does not have any substantive criticisms of our research. However, we would like to address 2 of Mathy’s points: first, that other population-based studies on this topic have been conducted, and second, that our analyses lacked cultural sensitivity. As our comment that prior research has been “primarily based on opportunistic samples” does not deny that some population-based research has occurred (which we cite), I am at pains to understand the contention that our “assertion” is incorrect. The implication is that there are no benefits to the publication of our article. This can be readily rebutted. Our analyses were based on data from a rigorously derived population-based sample of men who have sex with men (MSM) in 4 major US cities. The representative nature and size of this sample, along with the breadth of health issues covered in telephone interviews, have offered a unique perspective on urban MSM. Such a perspective is needed in addition to the groundbreaking work with opportunistic samples that typically preceded this research. Mathy cited Remafedi, who identified 6 “population-based and controlled studies published since 1997.”1 These publications actually represent 5 studies, as 2 articles2,3 reported on the same data set. Four2–6 were studies of school-based samples of adolescents, using the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Variations in the operationalization of sexual orientation (e.g., self-label, sexual behavior, “romantic attractions”) not only meant variations in the comparison groups but have led to discrepant findings in other analyses.7,8 Further, we noted that adolescents who self-identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual (GLB) by 13 to 18 years of age may not be representative of the broader GLB population, a point echoed by others. The remaining study defined a population-based sample of 750 men aged 18 to 27 years in a neighborhood in Calgary, Canada.9 However, the reported prevalence of homosexual activity, identity, or both contradicts prior demographic research and suggests the need for confirmatory research.10 As we noted, subsequent studies’ analyses using national data sets have been limited by relatively small numbers of MSM and lack of gay-specific variables. Mathy claims that our age cohort analysis lacked sensitivity to the culturally significant health-related events of this population. While the removal of homosexuality as a disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973 signaled a significant, affirmative shift in how the professional and academic world viewed homosexuality, it was embedded within larger social changes. It is unclear how immediately this action influenced the developmental experiences of gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals. The professional and academic resistance to this change was evidenced by the necessity 14 years later of removing “ego-dystonic homosexuality” from the DSM. Mathy’s critique does an injustice to the degree to which cultural context was considered in our article. We used a key watershed event—the Stonewall Riots and the birth of the modern gay liberation movement—as this marked an era of social transformation and empowerment for the GLB community. Research on GLB youth in the United States since that date (e.g., Cohen and Savin-Williams11) suggests that marked changes have occurred over time, not necessarily linked to any one event but as part of a progressive cultural shift. The reactions to these social changes are complex; evidence also suggests that GLB youth are facing greater violence today than in decades past.12 Thus we chose to compare those who reached age 25 by 1970 with cohorts that reached that age within subsequent decades, a 10-year span being not uncommon to this type of analysis. Our cohort analyses considered one marker in the growth of the GLB community, rather than other milestones suggested by Mathy. We may differ in the significance we attach to these milestones, but that is all.

British social movements since 1945: sex, colour, peace and power

Preface Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Parallel Universe: Social Movements before 1970 The Long Explosion I: Women's and Gay Liberation The Long Explosion II: The Environment, Race, Disability and Peace The Fragments: The Descent into Division in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s Quenching the Flames: Professionalisation and Integration in the 1980s Passions Re-ignited: Sexuality, The Poll Tax and Radical Environmentalism in the 1990s Conclusion References Index

Gay Liberation Comes to Dixie—Slowly

This article examines a little studied aspect of southern politics: the emergence of gay rights activists as players in mainstream southern politics. The article examines state-by-state electoral successes of openly-gay candidates throughout the South as well as the impact of gay rights activists on public policy (at both the local and state level), hate crimes legislation, employment rights, higher education, and private business. The movement of homosexuals from the shadows of society to open participation in public life has been a major national trend during the past three decades, and the South has not been in the forefront of this development. However, significant evidence suggests that, as Dixie has accommodated to other social changes, it is adapting to gay liberation-albeit more slowly than the rest of the nation.

South Africa's Democratisation and the Politics of Gay Liberation

When South Africa's final constitution was promulgated in 1996, it became the first in the world expressly to protect the rights of gay and lesbians. Since 1996, South African courts have decriminalised sodomy, ruled in favour of gay employees seeking benefits for partners, and supported immigration rights for foreign partners of gay South Africans. These gains are remarkable given the previously weak gay movement and the country's already crowded political and economic agenda in the wake of apartheid. This apparent tolerance also contrasts sharply with official homophobia and repression in neighbouring Zimbabwe and Namibia. This article argues that South Africa's democratic transition provided a political opportunity structure amenable to gay mobilisation. Secondly, the article examines how the gay liberation movement contributes to deepening South Africa's democratisation at a time when analysts are questioning the autonomy and strength of the country's civil society.

AFSC HAWAI'I GAY LIBERATION PROGRAM

AFSC HAWAI'I GAY LIBERATION PROGRAM

Writing the Self

At some level all is both autobiographical and therapeutic. This is clearly not true for which is incidental to other tasks (such as reports or taking minutes) and it is an unexceptional claim when made of fiction. This claim is perhaps most controversial when advanced as a proposition about academic writing, and indeed much of impenetrable jargon of certain sorts of social science and literary criticism may well stem from a desire to disguise personal. Anthropologists, like historians, have long debated position(ality) of writer in her or his work, and some of most bitter controversies in recent years have revolved around these debates. Ironically, I am, at least in formal terms, a political scientist, a discipline which has been far less engaged in these debates, as sterility of most political science prose attests. Perhaps luckily, I work in a University where we term our discipline politics, have no interest in reducing complexities of social behavior to mathematical formulae, and are situated within a larger grouping of disciplines which includes anthropology and sociology. For those of us engaged in that broad range of disciplines usually summarized as encompassing humanities and social sciences, claim to objectivity and science too often becomes, as I shall argue, a form of intellectual dishonesty. Given my own personal itinerary, it is hardly surprising that I have been attracted to idea of writing self. Indeed my own writings suggest a number of different ways this might be done. (I plead guilty to a certain degree of egoism in this piece, but line between confessional and straight selfpromotion is a hazy one.) My first book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1972) was both a coming out narrative and an attempt to analyse embryonic gay liberation movement through radical amalgam of Marxist-Freudian ideas briefly popular in early 1970s. Since then, I have written both academic articles, complete with standard apparatus of copious endnotes and appropriate data, as well as a novel (The Comfort of Men) and an autobiographical memoir (Defying Gravity). Against this background, it is not surprising that when I began to think seriously about academic and political debates around globalization, and in particular how they might relate to contemporary debates around sexuality, I wondered how far this was an exercise in autobiographical hubris. I was quickly struck by extent to which those scholars about globalization drew on serendipity as much as on scholarship for their examples. The very nature of about the global means we must appear at home everywhere, yet at same time none of us can know more than a small fragment of world. Thus, Thomas Friedman took metaphor which gave him title for his book, The Lexus and Olive Tree, from contrast between a newspaper story from Palestine and Japanese bullet train in which he was travelling when reading that story, while Salman Rushdie, unsurprisingly, set The Ground Beneath her Feet, his novel of global, in Bombay, London and New York. Another version of that story could just as easily move from Teheran to Berlin and Tokyo. The same seems true of more academic studies. Inevitably, anyone about the global writes from a particular viewpoint, and in so doing ignoresand is ignorant of-the great bulk of alternate positions. This is apparent in most post-colonial theorising, which stems largely from authors' need to reconcile their own ambivalent identities and positions just as feminist and gay theorists in heady days of early 1970s sought to do so in a rather different political context. Of course, it would be absurd to reduce post-colonialism to a collective autobiographical undertaking of predominantly south Asian academics, but it is equally impossible to avoid extent to which its project is directly related to their experience of balancing their sense of being outsiders at same time in both Mumbai and New York, Karachi and Manchester. …

Negotiating the Digital Closet: Online Pseudonymity and the Politics of Sexual Identity

Online surveillance interferes with the individual's ability to control their expressive identity - to determine the scope of the social context in which their activities are to be seen and interpreted. Entrepreneurs have responded to these concerns by offering pseudonymizers, which employ cryptographic techniques to allow users to create several unlinkable personae and choose among them when engaging in various online interactions. This article investigates the tension between pseudonymity as a design paradigm for privacy technologies and as a lived practice for users. Because coming out - strategic revelation and the claiming of identity - has been at the core of the gay liberation movement, this article posits a politically and sexually active gay professional man as an ideal user of pseudonymity software, and places the design logic of pseudonymity within that particular set of social understandings. It reveals the conflicts, contradictions and trade-offs inherent in that use. Pseudonymity permits a very strong control of identity. It permits the user to segregate his public performances, and to engage in public debate without fear of bodily retribution. However, it is all but useless as a means of controlling the social context of those performances. It requires that decisions about self-presentation in certain contexts be made in ignorance of who is sharing that context, and with what resources or purpose. While it promotes the production of multiple selves, those selves are not easily lent to practices of intimacy or community. Pseudonymity also facilitates profiling practices that define and reify classes of people, even as it protects the individual from some of the repercussions of being defined as part of that class. In short, pseudonymity software is informed by a politics of heroics rather than of community.

Eroticizing Men: Cultural Influences on Advertising and Male Objectification

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the model offered by Thomas Rochon is used to examine how ideas, activism, and changing American values have influenced advertiser practices as they relate to sexualized images of men in mainstream media. Previous research has highlighted the importance of economic shifts on advertiser practices, ignoring the importance of cultural factors, such as the influence of the gay liberation movement on representations of masculinity in the post 1960s era. Second, a quantitative analysis of sexualized depictions of masculinity is presented. These data suggest that men in contemporary advertisements increasingly display the visual cues of objectification. After positioning these sexualized images in a larger social, political, and economic context, the implications of male objectification is discussed.

Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field

Gilbert Herdt, Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999, xi + 327 pages.Reviewer: Andrew P. LyonsWilfrid Laurier UniversityTwenty years have now passed since the publication of Guardians of the Flutes which was arguably the best ethnographic examination of sexuality since Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages. Gilbert Herdt returned to New Guinea several times until 1993 when a nearly fatal bout of malaria led him to curtail his visits. This volume draws on those later field trips. Herdt re-examines and develops themes which he first discussed in Guardians. He also discusses the significance of his work not only for social anthropology but also for the Gay Liberation Movement. All of the nine essays in the volume originally appeared elsewhere and most readers will have read a few of them already. However, they fit very well together, and the author has contributed an excellent theoretical introduction. Readers unacquainted with Herdt's ethnography should note that it describes a population which prescribed homoerotic fellatio as a necessary part of male social development. There was no sexual play in the period prior to initiation. Prepubertal youths in the first stages of initiation were fellators; adolescents in the third stage of initiation were fellated by the younger boys. Marriage to females occured at the end of the initiation cycle. These customs reflected a system of thought in which mature male sexuality was tenuously achieved and always threatened by feminine, specifically menstrual pollution. An adequate supply of sperm was stored in the growing boy as a result of fellation. The receipt of sperm in heterosexual intercourse enabled women to produce breast milk.The notes on the book cover describe Herdt as a renowned anthropologist, a description which may provoke some jealousy but which does attest to his achievement. Until 1980 the anthropology of sexuality occupied a marginal place in our discipline. This was partly because sexuality was excluded by existing paradigms such as structural-functionalism and cultural ecology, and, more surprisingly, by later developments in psychological anthropology. In large measure this was because there was little middle ground between sociological approaches which regarded sexuality as too natural, too universal (see p. 4) and too threatening to sociological method to be worthy of consideration, and behaviouristic or ethological approaches which are neglectful of social meanings Within anthropology the study of sexuality could only be subsumed under such headings as kinship and gender.Another cause of neglect was the degree of professional, political and humanitarian risk involved in such investigations. Esther Newton has complained that her work on drag-queens was not regarded as legitimate research (Newton, 2000: 223). Of course the homosexual student of sexuality faces additional barriers. Sometimes they reflect pure prejudice; on other occasions biases may be more subtle. Kath Weston (1998: 189-211) has complained that her own work on lesbian sexuality within the USA has led to a degree of professional marginalization (such research, argue critics is not real fieldwork).Very often, the disclosure of information may be perceived as harmful to populations and individuals who are subject to the surveillance of outsiders as well as exploitation by sexual tourists. Such reports may also embarrass cultural insiders who wish to distance themselves from tribal traditions. It is for this reason that Herdt disguised the identity of the Sambia of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Last but not least the obtaining of information on matters sexual involves the establishing and affirming of a degree of trust which is most difficult to create as well as linguistic skills of a high order. There is no society without sexual taboos; there are few without rules of privacy or secrecy with respect to some matters. …