Gay Liberation

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Alexandra Pakzad - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • political opportunity and constitution making the emergence of a Gay Liberation movement in south africa
    Social Science Research Network, 2012
    Co-Authors: Alexandra Pakzad
    Abstract:

    Through tracking the development of South African Gay and lesbian organizations and the political opportunities they have utilized, this paper explores how an efficacious Gay Liberation movement — including the remarkable codification of Gay rights in the country’s constitution — was able to emerge in South Africa during its transition to democracy. Synthesizing a number of traditional conceptions of political opportunity, I consider the institutional changes to the South African state, the realignment of informal power relations, and the mechanisms by which such opportunities for change were utilized. The ways in which South Africa’s Gay Liberation movement identified and interacted with the changes of the post-apartheid era optimized chances for mobilization and influence, as activists availed themselves of all of the benefits of the emerging system of government. The transition to, and consolidation of, South Africa’s democracy opened a window of opportunity for the Gay rights movement; the end of the apartheid system made reform accessible and signified the possibility of Liberation for other marginalized groups. In essence, the shift to democratic rule in South Africa presented favorable political opportunities from which a historic transformation of Gay and lesbian politics emerged and succeeded. This movement was remarkable in many respects: that it emerged so strongly within a country divided along ethnic and socioeconomic lines, and equally impressive, that it was successful despite the opposition to Gay rights in neighboring countries.

John Cappucci - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • the Gay Liberation youth movement in new york an army of lovers cannot fail
    Journal of Lgbt Youth, 2010
    Co-Authors: John Cappucci
    Abstract:

    Stephan Cohen provides a unique comparative study of three queer youth groups that were active in New York City during the early 1970s, including Gay Youth, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and Gay International Youth Society at George Washington High School. Cohen focuses on these three groups due to the related characteristics that they possess, particularly their similar dates of establishment. In this study, Cohen discusses the reasons why youth were excluded from the queer Liberation movement and suggests how this isolation forced them to create separate organizations with distinct identities, agendas, and ideologies from their adult counterparts.

Retzloff Tim. - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

Harrison, Scott R. - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • The state of belonging: Gay and lesbian activism in the German Democratic Republic and beyond, 1949-1989
    2021
    Co-Authors: Harrison, Scott R.
    Abstract:

    By the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, thousands of Gay and lesbian East Germans had formed a vibrant, publicly visible Gay rights movement in their socialist homeland. I argue—quite in contrast to the existing historiography on the topic—that the movement was geographically diffuse and highly fragmented. Its adherents did not fight to make space in East German society for a Western style, identity-based politics of Gay Liberation, but rather for their fellow citizens to acknowledge that one could be both a socialist and Gay, and that the two were not mutually exclusive. While Gay men and lesbians who appropriated socialist notions of wholesomeness and respectability were the movement’s most visible figures, other actors, namely lesbian separatist feminists, jostled for position in a host of activist groups and publications which reached many thousands of ordinary East Germans by the mid-to-late 1980s. In so doing, this motley group of queer actors—whom historians have wrongly categorized as being either wholly thwarted by the state or as anti-statists—publicly expanded the boundaries of socialist citizenship to include those whose life trajectories did not lead down the path of heterosexual reproductive futurity. This study, thus, foregrounds the emotional experience of the post-World War II welfare state and contends that, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, albeit in different ways, public discussions about sexuality formed a crucial arena of civic belonging in which actors chronicled the “free unfolding of their personalities.” In the fall of 1989, as hundreds of thousands of East Germans took to the streets to proclaim that socialism no longer belonged to them—that it was no longer their emotional property—other thousands of queer East Germans had just begun to feel ‘at home’ and orientated in the GDR, as if they finally belonged there. In this dissertation, I am centrally concerned with tracking the ways in which modern states—of which East Germany was one—undertook social engineering programs in an attempt to ‘make citizens straight’ whilst simultaneously deploying homophobia as a political tool to mark insiders and outsiders in postwar communities of national belonging. I also narrate the stories of Gay and lesbian East Germans who resisted the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED’s) attempts to marshal all popular sexual impulses through the “single groove of heterosexuality.” We know a great deal about how the heterosexual masses lived, loved, and rebelled on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1945. However, we still know far too little about the lives of those who lived outside the bounds of heterosexuality and to whom the postwar welfare state denied a sense of emotional belonging, particularly in the GDR. My goal in writing a history of Gay rights activism in the GDR is not simply “to add previously silenced voices to the general chorus” of East German history. Rather, I destabilize seemingly natural, ‘set-in-stone’ histories from the vantage point of the queer margins in order to rethink what it meant to be both an East German and a “sexual citizen” in the GDR—an actor who claimed that sexual self-determination was a central aspect of the social contract which linked state and society. This project sits within a burgeoning camp of scholarship that takes seriously that there was such a thing as a “mainstream culture” in the GDR that was shaped by citizens—including Gay men and lesbians—across cross-cutting levels of society in complex and often contradictory ways. Therefore, this dissertation allows us to see the West as a place where Gay Liberation was possible during the 1970s and 1980s, but not the only place. It is time to move beyond asking the now trite question of ‘which postwar Germany had the more liberal sexual culture?’ to posing the more pressing question of ‘why is it that the modern state is so homophobic?’LimitedAuthor requested closed access (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste

  • The state of belonging: Gay and lesbian activism in the German Democratic Republic and beyond, 1949-1989
    2019
    Co-Authors: Harrison, Scott R.
    Abstract:

    By the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, thousands of Gay and lesbian East Germans had formed a vibrant, publicly visible Gay rights movement in their socialist homeland. I argue—quite in contrast to the existing historiography on the topic—that the movement was geographically diffuse and highly fragmented. Its adherents did not fight to make space in East German society for a Western style, identity-based politics of Gay Liberation, but rather for their fellow citizens to acknowledge that one could be both a socialist and Gay, and that the two were not mutually exclusive. While Gay men and lesbians who appropriated socialist notions of wholesomeness and respectability were the movement’s most visible figures, other actors, namely lesbian separatist feminists, jostled for position in a host of activist groups and publications which reached many thousands of ordinary East Germans by the mid-to-late 1980s. In so doing, this motley group of queer actors—whom historians have wrongly categorized as being either wholly thwarted by the state or as anti-statists—publicly expanded the boundaries of socialist citizenship to include those whose life trajectories did not lead down the path of heterosexual reproductive futurity. This study, thus, foregrounds the emotional experience of the post-World War II welfare state and contends that, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, albeit in different ways, public discussions about sexuality formed a crucial arena of civic belonging in which actors chronicled the “free unfolding of their personalities.” In the fall of 1989, as hundreds of thousands of East Germans took to the streets to proclaim that socialism no longer belonged to them—that it was no longer their emotional property—other thousands of queer East Germans had just begun to feel ‘at home’ and orientated in the GDR, as if they finally belonged there. In this dissertation, I am centrally concerned with tracking the ways in which modern states—of which East Germany was one—undertook social engineering programs in an attempt to ‘make citizens straight’ whilst simultaneously deploying homophobia as a political tool to mark insiders and outsiders in postwar communities of national belonging. I also narrate the stories of Gay and lesbian East Germans who resisted the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED’s) attempts to marshal all popular sexual impulses through the “single groove of heterosexuality.” We know a great deal about how the heterosexual masses lived, loved, and rebelled on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1945. However, we still know far too little about the lives of those who lived outside the bounds of heterosexuality and to whom the postwar welfare state denied a sense of emotional belonging, particularly in the GDR. My goal in writing a history of Gay rights activism in the GDR is not simply “to add previously silenced voices to the general chorus” of East German history. Rather, I destabilize seemingly natural, ‘set-in-stone’ histories from the vantage point of the queer margins in order to rethink what it meant to be both an East German and a “sexual citizen” in the GDR—an actor who claimed that sexual self-determination was a central aspect of the social contract which linked state and society. This project sits within a burgeoning camp of scholarship that takes seriously that there was such a thing as a “mainstream culture” in the GDR that was shaped by citizens—including Gay men and lesbians—across cross-cutting levels of society in complex and often contradictory ways. Therefore, this dissertation allows us to see the West as a place where Gay Liberation was possible during the 1970s and 1980s, but not the only place. It is time to move beyond asking the now trite question of ‘which postwar Germany had the more liberal sexual culture?’ to posing the more pressing question of ‘why is it that the modern state is so homophobic?

Steve Valocchi - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • individual identities collective identities and organizational structure the relationship of the political left and Gay Liberation in the united states
    Sociological Perspectives, 2001
    Co-Authors: Steve Valocchi
    Abstract:

    This article examines the ideological connections between the Left and the Gay movement from the 1930s to the 1970s. Using the concepts of spillover, spin-off, and collective identity, I develop a model of social movement connections and splits that stresses the dialectical relationship between the individual identities of social movement participants and the collective identity of the movement within different organizational structures. Using this model, I argue that the organizational centralization of the Old Left in the Communist Party prevented early “Gay” activists from extending the collective identity of the Left to accommodate issues of same-sex oppression; alternatively, the organizational fluidity of the New Left encouraged a more flexible understanding of collective identity, and same-sex oppression was incorporated into the rhetoric, albeit in a limited way and for a brief period. This model not only helps to identify the ideological innovations of the Gay movement but also contributes to the...

  • riding the crest of a protest wave collective action frames in the Gay Liberation movement 1969 1973
    Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 1999
    Co-Authors: Steve Valocchi
    Abstract:

    The major collective action frames of the U.S. Gay Liberation movement between 1969 and 1973 are described and their development traced. The origins of these frames lie in either the sixties protest wave or in the older homophile movement. These frames—Gay is good, sexual Liberation, heterosexism, oppression is everywhere—emerged dialectically and creatively from these two protest streams. Their emergence illustrates the utility of a focus on both social movement continuity and cycles of protest in explaining how social movement culture is created. This creative convergence did not produce a unitary ideology or a master frame from which the movement drew its strategy, goals, and collective identity. Instead, it created a tension between the notion of Gay people as a minority group and the notion of Gay people as cultural critics.

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