Gay Liberation Research Articles

From gay liberation to backlash: producing pride and New York’s LGBTQ public culture on The Emerald City

Abstract This article explores how The Emerald City (1977–1979), an LGBTQ public access cable television show, represented the evolving sociopolitical and geographic contexts of New York City in the 1970s and mediated the concept “gay pride.” Tracing its emplacement in New York alongside the development of cable television, this article discusses how the series played a role in producing dominant queer cultural imaginations of the city. Combining analysis of the show’s episodes with archival research and interviews with The Emerald City co-producer Steven Bie, this article argues both for the potential of public access to produce liberatory affective experiences of pride, as well as its role in idealizing a gay imaginary of New York limited by racialized and classed hierarchies. This article demonstrates how public access in the US provided opportunities for marginalized producers to experiment with creating gay television, as well as the structural constraints that limited its political promise.

Trip Away the Gay? LSD’s Journey from Antihomosexual Psychiatry to Gay Liberationist Toy, 1955–1980

Trip Away the Gay? LSD’s Journey from Antihomosexual Psychiatry to Gay Liberationist Toy, 1955–1980

“Aves de toda especie”: representaciones sociales de la homosexualidad en la prensa en Antioquia, Colombia, 1960-2000

Objective/Context: This article explores, from the perspective of cultural history, the social representations produced by the press about homosexuality in Antioquia (Colombia) during the second half of the twentieth century. In doing so, it aims to approach the figure of the sexual monster, the ridiculous homosexual, the infectious “faggot”, the individual explainable by science, and the subject who conquers its citizenship and disputes its rights. Methodology: The discourses and representations of homosexuality in the newspapers Sucesos Sensacionales, El Colombiano and the radio newspaper El Clarín were identified; an interpretative matrix was constructed by cross-referencing cultural elements of the context with journalistic representations. Originality: The period 1960-2000 corresponds to an unexplored period on the subject. Its revision is articulated with the observation of previous and parallel representations of the processes of homosexual liberation and the conquest of rights: the decades of 1960-1970, the emergence of hiv/aids in 1980, and the appearance of a series of social organizations around the anti-aids struggle in the 1990s accompanied by the juridical-political path traced by social movements. Conclusion: During this period, a homosexual subject emerges who, in addition to being outlined by the media, begins to postulate an image of himself that tensions the field of representations. Despite pointing to changes associated with freedoms and rights, the novelties in the press - influenced by international and local contexts and contested by everyday practices that claimed sex/gender dissidence - also pose a conservative counter-response that reinstates old ghosts and prejudices. Thus, this is not a linear and progressive history that moves from darkness to light, that is, from a dark past of violence and denial to the conquest of rights, but reflects diverse continuities and simultaneities in the representation of homosexuality.

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.

Panic of proximity: antigay evangelical discourse on the Metropolitan Community Churches in the 1970s

ABSTRACT Throughout the 1970s, the largely LGBTQ+ membership of the Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) was frequently described as evangelical by its observers, including by some evangelical leaders. Meanwhile, antigay evangelical writers labored to convince their audiences that the MCC was not what it looked like, and its members were not like them. This article analyzes the array of discursive strategies that antigay evangelical writers used to deny, distort, and distract from the MCC’s evangelical factions and features in the 1970s. These writers’ efforts reveal the severity of the threat that the MCC seemed, to them, to pose – if not to any doctrines, then certainly to predominant ideas about sex and gender within evangelical communities. Notwithstanding Religious Right rhetoric from the late 1970s onward about ‘secular’ gay liberationists, the evangelical panic over gay activism in this period was in part a panic over how similar, not how different, some gay liberationists were.

Sondheim at the disco

Songs from Stephen Sondheim’s musicals have occasionally left the theatre to circulate through popular culture – and, in some unusual instances, they have even made their way to the dance floor. This article examines three disco adaptations of Sondheim show tunes: ‘Send in the Clowns’ by Grace Jones, ‘The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’ by Gordon Grody and ‘Losing My Mind’ by Liza Minnelli. Informed by histories of queerness and cultural production, the author interprets these dance tracks as reflections of queer life in the 1970s and 1980s, from gay liberation and radically camp exuberance to the homophobic ‘disco sucks’ backlash and the devastation of AIDS. While casting a critical eye on the artistic merit of these cover versions, the article argues that taking Sondheim from the Broadway stage to the discotheque can create new understandings of the meaning and social significance of a great songwriter’s work.

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.

Memoryscapes of liberation: activist mnemonic labour in the queer press

ABSTRACT In this article, I will explore the role of memory in the context of homosexual liberation movements. I will do this through the lens of the queer press, which will serve as a doorway for the exploration of activist mnemonic labour. Activists undertake mnemonic labour to craft narratives that weave together historical oppression and resistance with hopes for a better future. These narratives are used to motivate and sustain activists in their present struggles. The queer press helps spread narratives across borders and creates shared memoryscapes for activism. My proposal is to view memoryscapes as schemata that inform activist mnemonic labour. On one hand, memoryscapes offer a shared purpose and direction for activists spread across different countries. On the other hand, they serve as arenas for mediation and comparison, linking distinct histories from diverse social groups and revealing their shared threads. This turns memory into a resource for building alliances across borders, and among different political and social groups. I will adopt this perspective to study two Argentinian homosexual liberation groups from the 1960s-70s: Nuestro Mundo and Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH). I will explore activist mnemonic labour on Nuestro Mundo’s bulletins and the FLH’s periodicals: Homosexuales and Somos. I will focus on two main aspects: (1) how activists adapt transnational narratives to the local context, and (2) how Argentinian activists weave narratives that blend historical oppression and resistance with visions of a different future.

Introduction: The Global 1970s from a History of Emotions Perspective

Abstract The 1970s have been identified through a range of emotional markers. This special issue critically analyzes the emotional history of this decade through a global perspective. In doing so, the contributions in this issue consider the different registers and scales at which emotions were experienced, perceived, and discussed. Drawing on discussions of gay liberation struggles in Latin America, decolonial movements in Palestine, the New International Economic Order, the North American Left, and forms of post-imperialist belonging in New Zealand and Australia, we detail how new emotional communities were produced and how distinct emotionalities were shaped in conjunction with shifting global politics.

Coming Out Collectively: The Emotions of Latin-American Homosexual Liberation Movements

Abstract In the article I study the emotions involved in the emergence of the homosexual liberation movement in Latin America. Marked by the radical ideas that came out of the sixties many queer organizations bowed to create a sexual revolution inside the social revolution. Because it was the first-time homosexuality came out to the public in the Latin America, at the same time in different countries, a sort of emotional community was formed. This happened thanks to the radical queer intellectual network that was formed after the Stonewall riots connecting the Americas with Europe. By sharing experiences and ideas I will argue that the Latin American homosexual liberation organizations also shared the process of what I have called coming out collectively, where things leaving shame and sadness, overcoming fear with courage, and building pride or anger were fundamental in the early years of the movement.

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.

Marxism and Homosexual Liberation

Abstract The decriminalisation of homosexuality was a measure originally adopted by the bourgeois revolutions, which was abandoned by the bourgeois parties as the rise of the labour movement led the bourgeoisie to seek a compromise with landlords, clergy and monarchy in different countries. The demand to decriminalise homosexuality was therefore taken over by the Marxist workers’ parties, such as the Social-Democratic Party of Germany before the First World War and the Bolshevik Party in Russia after the Revolution of October 1917. This article outlines the cooperation between the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee led by Magnus Hirschfeld and Social Democracy to decriminalise homosexuality by removing Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code before the First World War. It also describes the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia under Lenin, with the adoption of the first Soviet Penal Code in June 1922, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s relations with prominent figures of the early Soviet government such as N.A. Semashko, the first People’s Commissar of Public Health, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first People’s Commissar for Education. Those ties ceased with the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933, which resulted in the destruction of the institutions created by Hirschfeld, such as the Institute for Sexual Science and the World League for Sexual Reform, while in the Soviet Union itself Stalin recriminalised homosexuality in March 1934, shortly before Hirschfeld’s death, linking homosexuality and fascism.

Queer Affect at Work

Early on in her often moving new book, Queer Career, Margot Canaday quotes from an oral history interview she conducted in New York in 2012, at the very beginning of her research. The participant, an African American gay man, recalled his entry into the working world: “I was a typist, and I wanted to type.” The sentence provides early evidence for one of the major findings of the book, that before gay liberation, many queer and trans people chose lower-paying jobs in office and service work because it allowed for greater flexibility to pursue a sexual and social life outside of their job, and because there was less to lose if you were arrested. But Canaday also slows down to parse not just the speaker's words but also his intonation. As Canaday recalls, “[H]e didn't just state this; he joyfully exclaimed it: ‘I was a typist,’ his voice rose, ‘and I wanted to type!’” (19).

The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation. Male Homosexual Politics in 1970 s West Germany

The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation. Male Homosexual Politics in 1970 s West Germany

“We Are Claiming Space, We Are Visible!”: The Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand as a Space of Solidarity, 1980s–1990s

This article seeks to reintegrate the history of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) into southern African queer historiography, which has inadvertently sidelined the role of the organisation, ignoring the plight of GLOW’s activists, as well as many others, mostly black gays and lesbians. Through the use of archival material and interviews with former GLOW members, this article examines GLOW’s role in connecting the gay liberation struggle to the anti-apartheid struggle. The article interrogates GLOW’s role in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, which helped align gay and lesbian rights with the broader idea of rights for all citizens at a time in South African history when being against rights for any group of people was deemed unacceptable. This article further examines the various schisms within GLOW that facilitated its eventual decline, but which also made the organisation multi-layered. These multiple aspects of GLOW were crucial in creating solidarity between gays and lesbians who were able to successfully fight for a Constitution that would protect the rights of non-heteronormative society.

Ken Plummer: What it is to be human

Ken Plummer’s career embraced a range of interests, and disparate interventions but is marked by a remarkable consistency, rooted in a profound humanistic understanding of the social world. This is most fully expressed in his most recent publication, Critical Humanism, but is a leitmotif throughout his writings since the early 1970s. Whilst many of his contemporaries engaged in wild flirtations with every intellectual fashion from anti-humanism to post-humanisms, and whatever lies between, over the past half-century, Plummer has remained faithful to his early moral and theoretical interests whilst being sharply alert to every nuance and subtlety of contemporary debate. He is one of the most knowledgeable of sociologists, a fluent theorist but also a passionate and committed teacher who strives to communicate as widely as possible. And throughout his life and work, over many years, you can still trace the impact of a critical moment, his engagement with gay liberation from 1970 which profoundly shaped his trajectory as a scholar and engaged intellectual. This essay focuses on a number of key themes, Sexual Stigma, Sexual Stories, Intimate Citizenship, and Critical Humanism that together offer a story of Ken Plummer’s engagement with his overarching theme: what it is to be human.

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Fire on the island: Chester Weinberg and the first generation lost to AIDS

This article looks at the forgotten fashion designer Chester Weinberg, once very famous during his heyday, but then, as one of the first we lost to AIDS, he was stricken from the fashion history books. Through the case of Weinberg, the article examines the effects of AIDS on the fashion industry in the 1980s and early 1990s and consequently on gay culture as a whole during that era. It also uses Fire Island as a microcosmic metonymic of what was happening all across North America. That lush and hedonistic safe haven where ‘people who had felt like outcasts [found] community’ proved to be no match for the onslaught of the virus. As all of the hard-wrought gains of 1970s gay liberation imploded, AIDS devastated the lives of the first generation of truly liberated and free gay men. This article not only eulogizes and returns Weinberg to his deserved place within fashion history but also brings some of those lost pioneering men from Weinberg’s era back into focus again as well, alive again in memory, so that none of them will ever be forgotten.

Craig Griffiths, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany

Craig Griffiths, <i>The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany</i>