Gay Pride Research Articles

Triangles and tribulations: the politics of Nazi symbols.

This article explores the politics of "reclamation." Its focus is on pink and black triangles, currently used as symbols for gay and lesbian pride and liberation. Previously, these same identifiers were worn by those destined for annihilation during the Holocaust. I suggest that, in [re]claiming these markers, activists, however well intentioned, run a path dangerously close to the denial of history.

The Outside of Queer Cultural Studies

Summer in Montréal, hot and very humid. And as with every year, it seems that the heated pavement brings forth a new Montréal subject, a different social and civic subject wrought of the peculiarities of climate and sensibility. Indeed, it is a local cliché that for a brief moment of time Montrealers and Montréalais alike put off their penchant for politics large and small, cast off with the salt-stained boots and tired winter coats. Instead of political platforms we have bandstands, festivals compete and overlap into a weave of carnival, a moving warp of bodies against bodies: the International Festival of Fireworks, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, Divers-cité (our gay pride march), le festival du homard, le festival de la bière en fû, le Tour de l'île, Portuguese and Italian saints' days, the Construction Workers' holiday, les fétes du trottoir—all transform the streets into chaotic bursting capillaries of people celebrating something or other, or merely living fully in the forgetfulness that winter ever existed. Under banners that instruct `Montréal sourit aux touristes,' fair-weather subjects proliferate. If summer exuberance is common in places where winter is long and hard, Montréal may be uncommon for the ways in which its citizens are placed within a government-funded web of fun, the exhortations resembling school-teacherly dictates to get out there and play.

Communalization and Homophile Organization Membership:

This paper applies a sociological perspective to homophile organizational membership in the pre- and post-Stonewall gay community, and now, during AIDS. Focus is on comparing early theories of gay community organizational participation with the genesis, nature, and meaning of gay/AIDS volunteerism as a political statement. By emphasizing how the communalization of AIDS empowered gay people, earlier homophobic vocabularies of analysis are replaced with those that recognize gay pride as the source of organizational membership. Today, self-acceptance by gays leads to the willingness to “bear witness” to People with AIDS in voluntary community based initiatives which join the personal and collective interest in a way that confirms a positive homosexual identity. The theory that communalization empowers by undermining homophobia is supported by data taken for a survey of volunteers at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York.

A Proud Label: Exploring the Relationship between Disability Politics and Gay Pride

ABSTRACT This paper draws parallels between disability politics and the gay pride movement, in order to illustrate how different minority groups share experiences in common whilst retaining distinct qualities. Through exploring this relationship, issues such as normalisation, passing and challenging prejudice will be presented in a wider context. The social model of disability will be applied to experiences within the gay and lesbian community and the experience of dual oppressions will be addressed. The paper concludes with a focus upon the concept of the personal as political and the force of collective power.

Interactions entre l’argot homosexuel et la langue populaire : quelques exemples.

The gay community has asserted its right to be a visible part of the country's culture through its use of gay slang. Gay men (mostly) have responded to the terms used about them by reappropriating appellations or insults from the dominant discourse. By re-routing terms which were equated with deviance, gays meant to combat their invisibility. This article wishes to underscore the part played by the slogans chanted during the mass demonstrations of the 70s, the gay pride parades of the 80s and 90s and to examine a few examples of the gay practice of re-coding language.

Laughter in the Theatre of Mourning: The Politics of Ken Garnhum’s Beuys Buoys Boys

In the past decade, AIDS has entered the world’s consciousness, the photographs of people, often young men, ravaged both in body and in mind by the consequences of HIV making death startling imminent. These representations of people who have died of AIDS-related illness shape our response to what is, for many of us, our personal experience of hiv, either as carriers of the virus or as those who know carriers. As a number of critics (perhaps most notably Simon Watney) argue, the cultural production of response to hiv and aids-related illnesses is extremely important. aids, in Western culture, is seen as the social peril brought to the world by the sexual practices of gay men. The identification of aids with male homosexuality has given rise to virulent homophobia which reinforces the long-held perception in Western culture that gay sexual practices are the enactment of a death-drive which implicitly courts fatality.1 Elements of the gay community actively counter this discourse through a range of cultural interventions – the celebration of Gay Pride Day, the demonstrations of ACT UP and in the theatre, numerous plays from As Is, The Normal Heart, Warm Wind in China, The Panel, Flesh and Blood to Angels in America. Jeff Nunokawa has suggested that the status of these sorts of interventions is problematic for, while they respond to the virulent homophobia which sees homosexuality as death and aids as the logical consequence of that sexuality, precisely because they are responses, they serve to reinforce the very homophobia which they challenge. As Nunokawa writes, “[I]f the majority culture is not inclined to recognize the death of the male homosexual, it is also not inclined to recognize anything else about him ...” (319).

Visibility through Book Publishing: The Story of Clothespin Fever Press

A book on motorcycle repair that's easy to read and follow and includes a special photo section of the Dykes on Bikes at a San Francisco Gay Pride. An anthology of prose and poetry by lesbian writers that takes on life's many facets and ranges from the issue‐oriented to the nonpolitical. A rip‐roaring collection of short stories set in Texas, whose collection of characters includes lesbians, gay men, and heterosexuals. The memoirs of an adult child of an alcoholic as memorable for its original artwork as for its hard‐hitting narrative. The memoir of a preacher's daughter coming of age in 1940s and 1950s Texas, by a lesbian author noted for taking the specific and making it universal. A book of poems that poignantly expresses the grief felt when a spouse dies, but in this case the grief is magnified because the deceased's family will not acknowledge that their daughter was a lesbian, and they reject the surviving poet‐lover and her sorrow. An honest and compassionate account of a lesbian writer's struggle to balance her manic‐depression with her creativity. A directory of small publishers who, as women, have started presses which are often too small or too unusual to be listed in other directories.

Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960

We began a study of the history of the Buffalo lesbian community, 1930-1960, to determine that community's contribution to the emergence of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s.' Because this community centered around bars and was highly role defined, its members often have been stereotyped as low-life societal discards and pathetic imitators of heterosexuality. We suspected instead that these women were heroines who had shaped the development of gay pride in the twentieth century by forging a culture for survival and resistance under prejudicial conditions and by passing this sense of community on to newcomers; in our minds, these are indications of a movement in its pre-political stages.2 Our original research plan assumed the conceptual division between the public (social life and politics) and the private (intimate life and sex), which is deeply rooted in modem consciousness and which feminism has only begun to question. Thus we began our study by looking at gay and lesbian bars -the public manifestations of gay life at the time and relegated sex to a position of less importance, viewing it as only incidentally relevant. As our research progressed we came to question the accuracy of this division. This article records the transformation in our thinking and explores the role of sexuality in the cultural and political development of the Buffalo lesbian community. At first, our use of the traditional framework that separates the public and private spheres was fruitful.3 Because the women who patronized the lesbian and gay bars of the past were predominantly working class and left no written records, we chose oral history as our method of study. Through the life stories of over forty nar-

Gay is what?

"Say it clear, say it loud; gay is good; gay is proud." One Sunday at the end of June, this startling slogan reverberated along New York's Sixth Avenue, round the Chicago Water Tower and through other cities across the country as thousands of homosexual men and women marched openly in honor of "Gay Pride Week." The occasion was the anniversary of an unusual event, a battle between homosexuals and police sparked by a raid on a Greenwich Village bar in which the police were said to come off the losers.1 The groups on parade, representatives of the more than 100 . . .

The Other Irish Question

The influence of the Roman Catholic Church on Irish society makes it difficult for sex and health educators and HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. Divorce, abortion, consensual sex between consenting adult men, and contraception for those under 18 years is banned in Ireland. Public opinions and recent court decisions do appear to bring a measure of hope for more lenient attitudes. The trends vary from the recent Supreme Court case of the 14-year old rape victim being permitted an abortion because she was suicidal to a radio talk show host, Father Michael Cleary who suspected she was "set-up" to test the ban on abortion. Father Cleary also outraged health educators by stating inaccurately that condoms did not prevent AIDS. It is estimated that 500 Irish women have abortions each year in Britain; there have been 262 reported AIDS cases and estimates of up to 10,000 HIV infected out of a population of 3.5 million. An AIDS education campaign was mounted in 1987, but in the 37-minute Department of Health video only 1 minute was devoted to condoms and no sex was promoted as the only safe sex. Access is limited to consenting pharmacies and clinics for people 18 years of older; rural chemists may exercise discretion and refuse sales. In 1991, the government proposed lowering the age to 17 years for condom availability and assigning the regional health boards, the responsibility of determining who sells contraceptives. A university lecturer reported that inaction on this bill was close to "criminal inactivity." Challenges in February 1991 were made by the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA) in setting up a condom sales kiosk in Dublin. The IFPA was fined, but opinion polls indicated that 57% supported condom availability for 16 year olds. On Valentines Day in 1992, condom vending machines, which are illegal, were installed in pubs and nightclubs, police action has been cautious. A new health minister is concerned about AIDS prevention and the republic's first woman President holds liberal views on sexual matters. The European Court of Human Rights supported an Irish senators appeal on the legality of homosexuality. A Gay Pride float won the best new entry award in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Cork.