A Queer History of the United States (30 page)

The split between the pragmatism of GAA and the idealism of GLF echoed the earlier division within Mattachine and can be traced back to nineteenth-century political discussions of suffrage, free love, labor reform, and anarchism. GLF’s comprehensive vision of social justice was mirrored in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “no one is free, until everyone is free.” This approach distanced King from many civil rights activists and supporters as he began to vocally oppose the war in Vietnam, in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech, and to connect capitalism to black oppression. GAA’s single-issue politic had a much greater impact than GLF on mainstream gay political organizing. It became the template for the contemporary gay rights movement, which works to change, not overthrow, the system.

GLF had a more lasting impact on the formation of gay and lesbian youth groups across the nation. Between 1969 and 1980 nearly fifty youth support groups—aimed at lesbians and gay men in their teens—were founded. Some of these were grassroots and came out of the gay liberation movement; others were founded by progressive social service organizations.
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The advent of these groups made perfect sense, since gay liberation emerged, in part, from the youth counterculture, but also because young people were engaging in sex earlier. Lesbian and gay youth now had a political and social framework in which to declare and celebrate their identity. These youth groups provided them with a vital social outlet that was badly needed, since underage people could not go to bars to meet people, and coming out at school or home could be dangerous.

The men in GLF and GAA had grown up in a prefeminist world. Their actions, even after lesbians confronted them, often reflected their upbringing, which was not to take women and their concerns seriously. Nevertheless, many lesbians joined these groups because they were not welcome in the National Organization of Women (NOW) or even in some radical feminist groups. Betty Friedan’s antilesbian sentiments were so present in NOW that a group of lesbians, including Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown, formed the Lavender Menace, a guerilla action group. They confronted NOW’s members at its Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970, where they passed out their manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman.” A year later, NOW passed a resolution affirming that lesbian rights were “a legitimate concern for feminism.” But a critical break had occurred. The Lavender Menace, who now called themselves Radicalesbians and understood that their concerns were distinct from those of heterosexual women and gay men, began a distinct movement: lesbian feminism.

Lesbian feminism created a new political and social identity for lesbians that had not existed previously. Jill Johnston, a New York–based dance critic and activist nationally famous for her outspokenness and flair for publicity, stated in her 1973 book
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution:

Historically the lesbian had two choices: being criminal or going straight. The present revolutionary project is the creation of a legitimate state defined by women. Only women can do this. Going straight is legitimizing your oppression. As was being criminal. A male society will not permit any other choice for a woman.
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Faderman describes lesbian feminism as being “pro-women and pro-children” and compares it to the utopian vision of reformers such as Jane Addams.
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In the early 1970s, women started national networks of small presses, such as Daughters Inc., which published Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking lesbian novel
Rubyfruit Jungle
. They also founded over a hundred newspapers, magazines such as
Amazon Quarterly,
and music cooperatives and festivals such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Many lesbians still worked with gay men and heterosexual feminists on shared concerns, and lesbian feminism addressed many of the concerns that women in the Daughters of Bilitis had voiced about lesbians in the workplace, lesbian health, and legal discrimination that lesbians faced in relationships. But a world centered around women brought new ideas. Lesbian feminists set up health clinics, created grassroots political organizations, and instituted a widespread national network of communal living collectives that, although unaffiliated, saw themselves as part of a movement.

In their pursuit of making the world a safer place for children and women, some lesbian feminists, in conjunction with heterosexual feminists, articulated views about sex and gender perceived as antithetical to radical feminism and gay liberation. As a group, they were often called “cultural feminists” by their detractors. They criticized nontraditional sexual activity such as S/M and bondage, and they condemned drag queens and drag shows (which they saw as a parody of women’s oppression). They offered harsh critiques of transsexual and transgender people, such as Janice Raymond’s 1979
The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
, in which she argued that sex-reassignment surgery is violence against women’s bodies. In the mid to late 1970s they conducted censorship campaigns against pornography, which they saw as a cause of rape. Many of these positions generated heated, and often angry, discussion. Historian Alice Echols argues that “advocating sexual repression as a solution to violence against women [ends up] mobilizing women around their fears rather than their visions.”
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Lesbian theorist Gayle Rubin makes concrete comparisons of these policies to the ideas of the social purity movement.

The exciting, confusing, and often contradictory whirlpool of LGBT politics in the years after Stonewall helped, along with other forces, to shape the movement. It is striking, however, to realize that the numbers of people actively involved in these organizations were minuscule. As with the Mattachine, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Women’s Liberation Front, and the Black Panther Party, the work of a few people in small organizations touched the lives of large numbers of people and changed the world. One way the LGBT political groups did this was through their enormous influence on mainstream culture, now that homosexuality was more openly discussed than ever before. Publishing, film, TV, and the press reached millions of Americans.

Much of the mainstream press was implicitly positive. On October 31, 1969, just four months after the Stonewall conflict,
Time
had a cover story called “The Homosexual in America.” The article inside featured photos of gay liberationists on a picket line and a drag queen in a beauty contest. A discussion sponsored by the magazine among a panel of “experts,” including psychiatrists, clergy, liberals, and gay activists, was clearly won by the latter two. As
Time
noted, “the love that once dared not speak its name now can’t keep its mouth shut.” The April 1971 issue of
Playboy
featured a long “roundtable” on homosexuality that was clearly skewed against the conservative voices. The December 31, 1971, issue of
Life
included an eleven-page spread titled “Homosexuals in Revolt.” It was decidedly affirmative, featuring numerous upbeat photos of lesbian and gay activists.

The mainstream publishing industry, having discovered that positive depictions of lesbian and gay male life were a niche market, quickly published books on the subject. In
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism
, published in 1972, Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love argued—as Phillip Wylie had in the 1940s—that society has to be cured of its negative attitudes toward sexuality. In the same year, GAA member Peter Fisher’s
The Gay Mystique: The Myth and Reality of Male Homosexuality
argued that young people over the age of sixteen have a right to act on their sexuality and that lesbian and gay teachers would be positive role models for students. Dozens of fiction and nonfiction books presenting similar material were published by mainstream and smaller publishers over the next five years. Unlike pulp novels and sociological studies, these books determinedly affirmed homosexuality.

New freedom in Hollywood now allowed complex and compelling images of LGBT people. Sidney Lumet’s 1975
Dog Day Afternoon
featured Al Pacino as a gay male bank robber who was financing his lover’s sex change operation. George Schlatter’s 1976
Norman . . . Is That You?
, about an interracial gay couple dealing with one set of parents, was funny and politically incisive. Even television censorship—which had always been stricter than censorship in Hollywood, since television images entered the home—began to be relaxed. As early as February 1971, the enormously popular
All in the Family
featured a gay male character who was a former professional football player. Nine months later, the popular TV series
Room 222,
about an African American teacher in the fictional Walt Whitman High School, dealt with homosexuality and teens in the episode “What Is a Man?” In 1972 ABC presented a made-for-TV movie,
That Certain Summer
, in which a formerly married gay man comes out to his fourteen-year-old son. The only outcry was from gay liberationists claiming the movie was too timid. That same week NBC broadcast “A Very Strange Triangle,” an episode on the series
The Bold Ones: The New Doctors
, about a physician still in love with a woman he dated who is now in a lesbian relationship. John J. O’Connor, the
New York Times
critic, lambasted “A Very Strange Triangle” as biased against lesbians and noted, “If taboo subjects are going to be used for little more than injecting titillation into inane plots, they should be left taboo.” By 1978, in dramatizations such as the made-for-television film
A Question of Love,
legal questions of lesbian custody and parenting were being forthrightly, and sympathetically, discussed.

Liberation, Social Purity, and Backlash

Social, political, and cultural changes were happening on such a wide and visible range of fronts that many Americans, including the ever-expanding LGBT community, did not know what to expect next. Between 1969 and 1979, more than thirty thousand gay people, the majority of them men, moved to San Francisco. Like other great migrations, such as southern African Americans moving north, this shift—which continued into the 1980s—was vital in remaking a minority culture and formed one of the most important gay political and cultural centers in the United States. On a smaller scale, Huey Newton, chairman of the Black Panther Party, gave a speech in which he surprisingly acknowledged that the party should “try to form a working coalition with the gay liberation and women’s liberation groups” and that “homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.” This was the first, and maybe the only, time that a 1970s political group called for a coalition with gay liberation groups.

Other changes simply fell into the category of gossip, such as celebrities, both living and dead, coming out or being outed. Rock stars David Bowie, Elton John, and Janis Joplin claimed that they slept with both sexes. New biographies proclaimed that some of Hollywood’s biggest stars—such as Rudolph Valentino, Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorehead, Marlene Dietrich, and Errol Flynn—were lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

The hyped sexualization of the glitterati was indicative of widespread media coverage of a suddenly sexualized urban life. Nightlife in major American cities—especially New York, San Francisco, and Miami—was becoming identified with gay male venues. Newspapers gleefully reported on the Continental Baths, a plush gay male bathhouse located in a once-fashionable New York hotel that also housed a popular cabaret room open to heterosexuals. The Continental gained national prominence in when 1971 Bette Midler announced on the Johnny Carson show that she got her start there, playing mostly to men clad only in towels. Later that decade,
New York
magazine and other publications lavishly detailed the drug-fueled nightlife of high-profile discos such as New York’s Studio 54, popular with prominent politicians, sports figures, and rock stars. This copious public discussion about sexuality continually created the impression across America that traditional norms and moralities were outmoded. The frivolous, but commonplace, tone of these articles made them even scarier to women and men who were fearful that American culture was quickly losing its moral grounding. And their fears were not without reason: The huge success of anticensorship fights, the ongoing battle for reproductive rights (including abortion rights), the wider acceptance of recreational drug use, and increasing media glorification of nonreproductive heterosexual acts in films such as 1972’s
Deep Throat
all made the situation more ominous.

For conservatives, the issue was no longer simply about homosexuals. If homosexuality was a disease, as the psychoanalysts argued, it was infecting the entire body politic. To the conservative mind, this infection was seen in a number of alarming ways. Heterosexuals, for instance, were beginning to act like homosexuals. Gay people, who had never had the ability to marry, had long demonstrated that couples could maintain relationships without state or religious sanction. Heterosexuals, consciously or not, learned from their example. Census figures show that the rate of heterosexual cohabitation rose 1,150 percent from the 1960s to 2000, from one out of ten couples to seven out of ten. As more and more heterosexuals began to cohabit, the widespread cultural acceptance of the practice made it easier for homosexuals to be open about their own relationships.

As if all this was not bad enough, homosexuality was literally spreading. In May 1974,
Time
magazine reported on “The New Bisexuals,” claiming that “bisexuals, like homosexuals before them, are boldly coming out of their closets, forming clubs, having parties and staking out discotheques.” The article attributed the rise of bisexual women to Kinsey, feminism, and “the emphasis by [sex therapists] Masters and Johnson, among others, on the clitoral orgasm that has led to more sexual experimentation.” It ended, however, with a warning about families and children. Such warnings were becoming increasingly prevalent in writing about nonstraight sexualities. In the same
Time
article, Manhattan psychoanalyst Natalie Shainess noted that “the constant ricocheting from one sex to the other . . . can create unstable friendships as well as a chaotic home life. If there are children involved, this may confuse their sense of sexual identity.”
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