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The Historical Faultlines of Queer Activism

By Gina Buono


As a queer person myself, learning the history of LGBTQ culture and activism is in part a personal mission. However, as someone who lived through milestone moments such as the passage and removal of California’s 2008 Proposition 8, the legalization of gay marriage in the United States, and the Bisexual/Pansexual redefinition, my early years of queer activism were spent focusing on the present instead of the past. This was compounded by the fact that there is very little attention paid within the community to activism before Stonewall, even though Stonewall occurred in 1969 at the tail end of what most people refer to as the Civil Rights Era. In approaching this topic, I wanted to understand why people didn’t talk about the queer organizations of the 1950s and 1960s and found patterns that reflect upon the current failures of LGBTQIA organizing. First, the reason many of these organizations don’t get talked about within the community is because they were small, short lived, and failed to cooperate enough to enact large scale change like their counterparts in the Civil Rights Era. Secondly, these groups stagnated and diverged because of widespread gatekeeping and divisiveness that impeded their political goals.


In the blog, I walk through some specific examples of disagreements that prevented the different identities under the queer umbrella from organizing together, both between identities and within identities. Between identities, there was little cooperation between gay homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society and lesbian ones like the radicalesbians. The Mattachine Society of Washington, and other homophile organizations, promoted their cause primarily by arguing that homosexuality was an inconsequential character trait. The founders of the organization applied this same logic to other statuses, such as sex and race. While lesbians shared some struggles with gay men (such as marriage inequality and job insecurity) there were other issues core to the lesbian cause (such as wage inequity) that were more relevant to the feminist cause. As a result, many lesbians felt homophile organizations weren’t sympathetic enough to their issues as women and left to join feminist or lesbian organizations instead.


There were also conflicts within feminist and grassroots organizations. First, while individual chapters and members of NOW accepted lesbians, the national founders and leaders were blatantly antagonistic towards lesbians, with founder Betty Freidan calling them a “Lavender Menace.” They believed lesbian members would undermine the organization, but ironically internal protests and debates over the question of lesbian membership likely distracted from the goal of passing the Equal Rights Amendment. It wasn’t until after the ERA failed that NOW began consistently supporting gay rights, but by then many lesbians had left for grassroots organizations. However debates over what lesbianism was and who was really a lesbian created a hostile atmosphere inside those groups that excluded those perceived to be ‘not the right kind’ of lesbian. This of course disproportionately targeted transgender women, mothers, sex workers, working class women, and women of color.


Gay organizations also struggled with issues of gatekeeping, but instead tried to appeal to the patriarchy. Swishes (effeminate gay men), Drag Queens, and transgender women were favorite subjects of criticism among gay organizations for supposedly perpetuating negative stereotypes about gay men, alerting the police of gay bars and other community spots, and not being the ‘right kind of man’. At the same time it put this group of people, which was also disproportionately poor and non-white, in the most frequent contact with police. This led to them taking a more prominent role in the gay liberation movement, which began with Stonewall.


There were also issues that were common among queer organizations of all kinds during the Cold War period, generally caused by a lack of intersectionality and solidarity with other minority groups. This includes policies like dress codes, which often proved to be classist, sexist, and racist. In addition all queer groups faced issues due to secrecy, as many gay people were unwilling to give membership details for fear of being outed while potential allies were off put by the invasive and complicated security processes. Organizations across the board also failed to connect with the working class, Black Americans, gay parents, and those outside the gender binary.


So how does this connect to today? Well, LGBTQ activism, especially after clearing the goal of gay marriage, has fallen back on the bad habits of these early organizations. In 2018, a group of protestors hijacked the London Pride Parade to demean trans women as being predators targeting lesbians. While many were repulsed, others were shocked even though it is clear from the history and policies of these organizations that discrimination against trans women in particular is entrenched in much of queer activism. These Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFS) argue that sexism is based on biology and use a basic understanding of biology to accuse trans women of really being men and not experiencing sexism. Of course, their hyperfocus on trans women as opposed to trans men is a perfect example of misogyny. From the outside it is easy to disregard TERFs as a loud minority, but they have acquired a large following of straight ‘feminist’ allies, including ‘progressive’ celebrities like J.K. Rowling. This group is representative of the anti-trans sentiment lingering beneath the surface of the community, a continuation of the divorce between those who started the gay liberation movement at Stonewall and the others that ignored them until they were in that position. There are multiple issues within the community today that are revivals of previous conflicts including the enforcement of the gender binary, groups that try and prevent the use of queer as a label, anti-trans bias in media such as Rupaul’s Drag Race, and the widespread appropriation of African American slang like ‘Tea’, ‘Shade’, and ‘Reading’. Even the standard academic definitions that seek to cleanly separate gender from sexuality were influenced by desires to be politically palatable, rather than encapsulate the full range of queer experiences.


If there is one lesson to be learned from this period of queer history, it is that no minority group is a monolith, which is especially true of a community most commonly represented through an acronym. There is a tendency among activists to think of the moral choice as natural, however this ignores that society has socialized each of us to think in ways that we are not predisposed to. The only way to truly be an ally and an advocate of any minority community is to act and communicate with empathy and intent.


About the Author: Gina Buono graduated with a B.A. in History from Adrian College in 2020.


Sources:


Burns, Katelyn. “J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British Culture” Vox Magazine, Dec. 19, 2019. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/12/19/21029874/jk-rowling-transgender-tweet-terf


Crowley, Patrick. “RuPaul Responds to Backlash Following Hurtful Comments: ‘You Are My


Gabbatiss, Josh. “London Pride: Anti-trans activists disrupt parade by lying down in the street to protest ‘lesbian erasure’.” Independent, July 7 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/anti-trans-protest-london-pride-parade-lgbt-gay-2018-march-lesbian-gay-rights-a8436506.html


Gilmore, Stephanie, and Elizabeth Kaminski. "A Part and Apart: Lesbian and Straight Feminist Activists Negotiate Identity in a Second-Wave Organization." Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 1 (2007): 95-113. www.jstor.org/stable/30114203.


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Peacock, Kent W. "Race, the Homosexual, and the Mattachine Society of Washington, 1961-1970."Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 2 (2016): 267-96. www.jstor.org/stable/44862300.


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