Stonewall Riots Research Articles

AIDS Coverage in The Body Politic, 1981–1987: An Annotated Bibliography

Introduction In several years after 1969 Stonewall riots, North America saw flowering of gay press in major urban centers. Toronto had numerous gay periodicals of its own prior to this time, but city's most significant chapter in gay journalism began in November 1971 when The Body Politic published its first issue. The periodical continued for another fifteen years, publishing 135 issues before its demise in February 1987. The Body Politic eventually became source of some of best gay journalism in North America. Its influence on gay and lesbian movement in Canada cannot be overestimated, helping to define gay thought throughout country and beyond. (1) In fact, The Body Politic was not simply a gay newspaper, but was seen by some as the house organ of Canadian gay movement. (2) For its writers, journalism was essentially politics by other means. Many of important moments in Canadian gay history during this period were played out on pages of The Body Politic. There are many examples of political role of periodical, but two most prominent examples of this are surely high-profile obscenity trials sparked by a 1977 article on intergenerational sex, and key role played by The Body Politic in organizing a response to notorious bathhouse raids that took place in Toronto between 1978 and 1981. (3) Throughout its history, The Body Politic advocated what were then considered radical gay values: its perspective was consistently community-based, sex-positive, anticensorship, and supportive of choice and self-determination. Now, fifteen years since its demise, The Body Politic is still invaluable as a documentary source of Canadian gay history. (4) An important chapter in this history began in September 1981, publication date of first article in Canadian gay press on what eventually became known as AIDS. It was first of some 150 articles on AIDS to appear before paper's last issue. Written by an impressive list of authors, including Michael Lynch, Rick Bebout, Jane Rule, Ed Jackson, Ken Popert, Gerald Hannon, Bill Lewis, and Cindy Patton, these articles provide a window into way epidemic impacted Canadian gay community and how these events were interpreted in crucial early years. In a January 1986 memo circulated internally to The Body Politic collective, journalist Rick Bebout characterized The Body Politic coverage of AIDS as embodying following four approaches: skepticism of scientific and media authority; need to resist panic and hysteria both within and beyond gay community; need to seek information on which we can make informed judgments about sexual practices; and, most recently, need to preserve what is best and most distinctive about gay erotic culture in face of a disease which apparently threatens its very roots. (5) The Body Politic writers were determined to find an appropriate gay response to crisis and to resist being overtaken by forces such as public health establishment, medical profession, and mainstream media--forces often seen as hostile to gay community. The challenge, as The Body Politic saw it, was to respond effectively to epidemic while preserving community-based and sex-positive values of gay community. After years of struggle, The Body Politic refused to surrender hard-won freedoms of sexual expression and self-determination to professionals, pundits, and politicians. The Body Politic journalism shows how this new challenge to gay culture and identity was negotiated. The historical of AIDS epidemic are well known. The importance of The Body Politic coverage is not so much for its chronological record of these facts--after all, writers of The Body Politic seemed to believe that facts rarely spoke for themselves--but for its interpretation of events. …

Rebels, rubyfruit, and rhinestones: queering space in the Stonewall South

While Scarlett O'Hara may resemble a drag queen, and Mardi Gras inspires more camp than a gay pride parade, the American South also boasts a rich, authentic and transgressive gay and lesbian history. In this chatty, free-ranging cultural survey, Sears (Growing Up Gay in the South) presents a vivid kaleidoscope of the mores and political activities of many gay Southerners following the 1969 Stonewall riots and leading up to the 1979 march on Washington. Sears unspools this history through portraits of activists and community organizers including Merril Mushroom, Jack Nichols, Lige Clark, Vicki Gabriner, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Sgt. Leonard Matlovitch who helped shape the social and political climate below the Mason Dixon line and often in the rest of the country. While giving a nod to historic events like Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign, Sears focuses more closely on obscure but important local political events, like the founding of the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom, the emergence of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance and community response to a deadly firebombing that killed 31 patrons in a New Orleans bar in the mid-1970s. Sears's multifaceted approach pays off when he sketches such relatively unknown players as comedian Ray Bourbon and radical fairy Faygele ben Miriam, and he conveys well the complexity and intensity of the political activity of the decade. While not as historically conclusive or theoretically astute as John Howard's masterful Men Like That (2000), Sears provides a panoply of emotionally riveting snapshots that aptly portray Southern gay experience in the 1970s. B&w photos.

The Circle of Liberation

Summary This essay, in reviewing Jesse Green's The Velveteen Father, reflects upon some of the social changes that have surrounded the movement for gay and lesbian civil rights. Prior to the Stonewall riots, postwar homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society affirmed a deep loyalty to the mores of society. After Stonewall, all that changed and accommodationism was out. Post-Stonewall gay liberationists argued that gay men and lesbians would not get their rights by trying to act like heterosexuals. Tragically, the liberate)ry sexual philosophy of the 1970s could not have envisioned the devastation to be wrought by the AIDS epidemic of the ′80s. The gay liberation politics of the ′70s would find itself supplanted by other ideologies, such as a call for gay political conservatism or the integration of one′s gay identity with traditional religious values. Gay and lesbian politics of the late ′80s and ′90s, like that of the ′50s and early ′60s, was to be about fitting into the mainstream. Contemporary...

City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972

In this history, Marc Stein takes an in-depth look at Philadelphia from the 1940s to the 1970s. What he finds is a city of vibrant gay and lesbian households, neighbourhoods, commercial establishments, public cultures and political groups. In doing so, Stein shatters the myth that lesbian and gay history began with the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City and challenge the notion that only New York and San Francisco featured major lesbian and gay communities in the pre-Stonewall era. Stein takes us on a tour through Philadelphia's bars, restaurants, bookstores, bathhouses, movie theatres, parks and parades where lesbian and gay cultures thrived. We learn about the scientific experts, religious leaders, public officials and journalists who attacked and ignored same-sex sexualities. And we read about the courageous people who fought back with strategies of everyday resistance and organized political activism. Stein argues against the idea that a conspiracy of silence surrounded gays and lesbians in the 1940s and 1950s. He shows that same-sex sexualities were regularly discussed in controversies concerning the tennis player Big Bill Tilden, the Walt Whitman Bridge, sex murders and crimes, and police raids. Philadelphians became national leaders in the gay and lesbian movement. They conducted sit-ins at Dewey's restaurant, organized pickets at Independence Hall, edited the movement's most widely circulated publications, the Ladder and Drum, and pursued court cases all the way to the US Supreme Court. Stein's book not only provides a new starting place for thinking about lesbian and gay history but also challenges readers to rethink 20th-century urban history.

Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s

TH E T E L L I N G O F United States gay history after the Second World War is often marked by two key events: the founding of the Mattachine Society in 1951 as the nation’s “first” gay rights organization and the eruption of the Stonewall Riots in 1969 at the beginning of the period of gay liberation.1 Both events are cited as major turning points in the centurieslong struggle for the creation of a stable gay community and in the development of a homosexual political movement. With frequent retellings these events have achieved the status of defining myths along the same line as creation stories: powerful in their symbolism, if contested in their facts and meanings. While the history of the Stonewall Riots has received a great deal of attention and constant reconsideration, the historiography of the Mattachine Society has not evolved significantly since historians began writing about it twenty-five years ago.2 Still, the founding organization of the

Retrenchment from a Queer Ideal: Class Privilege and the Failure of Identity Politics in AIDS Activism

In the decade following the 1969 Stonewall Riots, identity politics in New York City enabled the construction of a socially and recreationally defined homogeneous gay identity. But contrary to common self-congratulatory accounts that have made their way into the social scientific literature, this gay identity was woefully unprepared to launch an effective political response to AIDS in the 1980s. The AIDS activism movement which did finally emerge in the form of ACT UP/New York was born from within the gay identity, but it embraced a more expansive coalitional politics. Its amplified vision called for a critique not only of medical research procedures and public funding initiatives but also of the larger political-economic and social structures that had translated a medical emergency into a social catastrophe. This more expansive politics gave rise to the Queer movement, premised less on essential identity than on affinity of commitment. But this political evolution was not internally uncontested: the more privileged white middle-class men within ACT UP resisted any movement away from a narrowly medical approach to AIDS for those with access. The resulting conflict eventually crippled ACT UP, perhaps irrevocably. Some gay and queer geographical theorizing has learned from the Queer movement and has embraced the politics of affinity, in that it has been willing to incorporate in its analyses an investigation of the ways in which gay identity politics is implicated in the wider systems of stratification along axes of gender, race, and class. But most gay geography remains trapped in the rather narrow vision of identity politics.

Psychotherapy of sexual dysfunction.

There is a palpable tension in the sexological literature between an empirical/biological approach that focuses on the phenomenology of sexual behavior and a theoretical/psychological approach that explores the quality of the subjective experience of the sexual encounter of humans. Both paradigms have made valuable contributions, but any theorizing about human sexuality or description of psychotherapeutic treatments of sexual dysfunction has to take the societal developments of this past century into account. As Tiefer (1) says, Sex is Not a Natural Act. Sexual habits and mores have been influenced by the Americanization of Freud, the Kinsey reports (2,3) and the emergence of pornographic media. Furthermore, the birth control pill, abortion and feminism shaped especially women's sexuality in a profound way. The Stone Wall Riot, Gay Liberation, and the Sexual Revolution of the 60s called longheld sexual beliefs into question. In the past two decades our sexual lives have been impacted upon by new technologies in reproduction, the AIDS epidemic, gender experimentation and transgenderism, the Internet and sex in cyberspace, and last, but not least, the remedicalization of sexuality via Viagra. Rather than of sexuality, we now speak of sexualities: anomie seems to be the condition of modern man/woman. Hence, we feel called upon to continuously reinvent ourselves: what (sexual) version of myself will I be today? Traditional sexual scripts (4) - the Who, Why, Where, What, When and With Whom of sexuality - have to be negotiated and renegotiated as individuals of divergent cultural and religious backgrounds encounter each other in the global marketplace of migrating populations. Radical conceptual changes in our notion of sexual problems and sex therapy have characterized the 20th century. Psychoanalysts, conditioned by theories of hysteria, tended to view sexual difficulties as indicative of repression and focused their efforts on the interpretation of intrapsychic conflict. With the publication of Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Inadequacy (5), performance anxiety was postulated to be the basic ingredient to all sexual dysfunction. Therapeutic approaches utilized sensate focus and other directive techniques in order to promote an active relearning process. The initial optimism and enthusiasm of Masters and Johnson's pioneering work with quasi miraculous two week cures in St. Louis, however, gave way rather quickly to a sobering appreciation of the complexity of the sexual life of couples. Tiefer (1) challenged the scientific method of Masters and Johnson. She points out that these researchers do not refer to a human sexual response cycle (HSRC), but rather the HSRC, as if it were a natural constant. She questions the empirical validity of their research because the subjects were carefully selected volunteers with higher than average intelligence, more affluent socioeconomic backgrounds, and a greater level of sexual enthusiasm. They had to be able to experience orgasms with masturbation and coitus under laboratory conditions. (Not all of us would qualify! ) Given the selection bias, the findings could hardly be representative of ordinary men/women. Clearly, sexual response is not gender neutral. However, by establishing the semblance of gender equality, Masters and Johnson have, in fact, inadvertently contributed to a trivialization or denial of the social reality of women which is itself shaped by gender inequality. The focus on genital arousal and ability to achieve orgasm as the ultimate goal of a functional sexual encounter without consideration of the quality of the experience and the social context, in which the sexual encounter takes place, seems particularly unrepresentative of the emotional and sensual needs of women. In the long run, the idealized HSRC indeed became reified as a quasi EKG of sexuality. Even though common sense dictates that sexual response does not always follow a predictable pattern, couples define any deviation from the normative curve as BAD SEX and identify themselves as sexual failures. …

Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood

Research Article| September 01 2000 Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood Abigail Cheever Abigail Cheever Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2000) 46 (3): 346–368. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-4005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Abigail Cheever; Prozac Americans: Depression, Identity, and Selfhood. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2000; 46 (3): 346–368. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-4005 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

The seventies now: culture as surveillance

Most would agree that American culture changed dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s. Yet the 1970s, the decade between, is still somehow thought of as a cultural wasteland. In Seventies Now Stephen Paul Miller debunks this notion by examining a wide range of political and cultural phenomena--from the long shadow cast by Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal to Andy Warhol and the disco scene--identifying in these phenomena a pivotal yet previously unidentified social trend, the movement from institutionalized external surveillance to the widespread internalization of such practices. The concept of surveillance and its attendant social ramifications have been powerful agents in U.S. culture for many decades, but in describing how during the 1970s Americans learned to survey themselves, Miller shines surprising new light on such subjects as the women's movement, voting rights enforcement, the Ford presidency, and environmental legislation. He illuminates the significance of what he terms microperiods and analyzes relevant themes in many of the decade's major films--such as Deer Hunter, Network, Jaws, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now--and in the literature of writers including John Ashbery, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, and Sam Shepard. In discussing the reverberations of the 1969 Stonewall riots, technological innovations, the philosophy of Michel Foucault, and a host of documents and incidents, Miller shows how the 1970s marked an important period of transition, indeed a time of many transitions, to the world we confront at the end of the millennium. Seventies Now will interest students and scholars of cultural studies, American history, theories of technology, film and literature, visual arts, and gay and lesbian studies.

The queer renaissance: contemporary American literature and the reinvention of lesbian and gay identities

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots ushered in the contemporary gay liberation movement, overt representations of same-sex desire in American literature and the arts were few and far between. Even in the 1970s, when gay and lesbian cultures began to register on our national consciousness, such work was still quite rare. In the 1980s and 90s, however, all that changed. The Queer Renaissance puts a name to the unprecedented outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets, and playwrights in the past two decades. This volume is one of the first to analyze critically this cultural awakening and is one of the only books to consider the work of gay male and lesbian writers together. Most importantly, The Queer Renaissance is the first book to consider how this wave of creative activity has worked in tandem with a flourishing of radical queer politics. The Queer Renaissance explores the work of such important figures as Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Randall Kenan, Gloria Anzalda, Tony Kushner, and Sarah Schulman to question the dichotomy between art and activism. In addition, The Queer Renaissance interrogates the ways queer theory deploys, intersects with, and contests contemporary theoretical movements such as cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory, and Chicano/a theory.

Sociopolitical antecedents to Stonewall: analysis of the origins of the gay rights movement in the United States.

The 1969 Stonewall riot in New York City is widely celebrated as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. However, the social changes that followed were possible only because of a decades-long indigenous organization. This article examines three traditional organizational theories on social action movements and applies Aldon Morris's analytical framework for understanding collective social action to the emergence of the modern U.S. gay civil rights movement. The author concludes that social workers need to understand how to gain access to and support indigenous social structures to assist oppressed groups to bring about social change.

The lavender vote: lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals in American electoral politics

In the quarter century since the Stonewall riots in New York City's Greenwich Village launched the national gay-rights movement in earnest, LGB voters have steadily expanded their political influence. The Lavender Vote is the first full- length examination of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals as a factor in American elections. Mark Hertzog here describes the differences in demographics, attitudes, and voting behavior between self-identified bisexuals and homosexuals and the rest of the voting population. He shows that lavender self- identifiers comprise a distinctive voting bloc equal in numbers to Latino voters, more liberal across the board on domestic social issues (though not necessarily on economic or national security issues) than non-gay voters, and extremely unified in high-salience elections. Further, lavender voters, contrary to popular belief, are up for grabs between the two major parties. Offering a clear and thorough explanation of LGB voting tendencies, this volume will be must-reading for elected officials, candidates for office, and all those interested in learning about LGB voters.

Homosexuality and the American left: the impact of Stonewall.

Following the Stonewall Riots in New York City in June 1969, the left had to reassess negative appraisals of homosexuality that prevailed among virtually all leftist currents. Pressure for change came from within and from without. By the mid-1970s, three approaches had emerged: (1) radical support for sexual liberation and acceptance of same-sex love as being on a par with heterosexuality; (2) liberal support for the civil rights of homosexuals but without challenging heterosupremacy; and (3) continued adherence to the (Stalinist) view that homosexuality is a form of "bourgeois decadence" alien to the working class. This essay assesses the ways in which the left adapted to the new challenges that confronted it, with particular focus on attitudes toward the nature of homosexuality and its relation to the broader goals of the left.

Gay and Lesbian Politics

has become part of the American lexicon, a result of events at Sheridan Square in New York City in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969. The Stonewall Inn, one gay bar amid scores of others in Manhattan, was about to be raided by the New York Police Department. Nothing unusual for New York, or most other large cities for that matter. Gays and lesbians had become almost inured to police harassment. When one's sexual preference is the object of criminal law, when one's psychological status is continually demeaned, when one is denounced from the pulpit and ridiculed in the mass media, what is one more raid on an after-hours gay bar? But the raid on the Stonewall Inn did not go as planned. Instead of the usual compliant crowd the police encountered catcalls and cries to topple the paddy wagon.' The crowd, in an unruly mood, was soon joined by sympathizers and other bystanders. Hundreds if not thousands of youths participated. Several nights of often brutal confrontations with the police followed. As a young instructor in the political science department at Ohio University, I read the news stories about the Stonewall riots with incredulity. Like so many other gays and lesbians of my generation, I found it quite easy to identify with the plight of other minorities. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a great inspiration to all who identified with the demands for equality under the law. The anti-war and the women's rights movements were similarly energizing. These movements demonstrated what could be accomplished through grassroots organizing. But the idea that gays and lesbians would one day organize for the purpose of establishing their legal rights was an idea that I had never entertained-even in my dreams--until Stonewall. Ten years passed before the idea of creating a course on the politics of the gay and lesbian rights movement dawned on me as a possibility. It was not until I was approached by a

Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement

The issue of man/boy love has intersected the gay movement since the late nineteenth century, with the rise of the first gay rights movement in Germany. In the United States, as the gay movement has retreated from its vision of sexual freedom for all in favor of integration into existing social and political structures, it has sought to marginalize cross-generational love as a "non-gay" issue. The two movements continue to overlap, amid signs of mutual support as well as tension--a state of affairs that also characterizes their interrelationship in other countries. This article offers an overview and analysis of that interrelationship in the United States since the Stonewall Riots in New York City in June 1969, which marked the beginning of a reinvigorated struggle for gay liberation.

The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada

The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada