THE JESUITS TRAINED ME WELL.
My high school
speech and debate coach taught me how to speak in complete paragraphs and to construct what
he described as a "seamless" argument. Many years later, a close friend and fellow historian used
the same word in reference to my historical writing. He described one of my books as a
"seamless" narrative. Well, that skill, if I have it, has eluded me as I've tried to compose my
contribution to this discussion. So, instead, I offer a series of disconnected, but I hope relevant,
observations.
I have been
teaching an undergraduate history course on the U.S. in the 1960s for almost twenty-five years.
Since important elements of the spirit of "the sixties" lasted well into the seventies and were
passed on by older brothers and sisters, for a long time my students came to the course already at
least partly versed in that decade's history. But, a few years ago I noticed that something decisive
had shifted. I now have to explain that liberal and left are two different political categories; that at
many points in the sixties they were bitterly opposed to each other; and that "radical" in the sixties
meant something other than a wild fundamentalist, whether Christian or Muslim.
The change
brought home to me what I suppose I already knew but didn't want to admit: that the left in the
U.S. today is so inconsequential that groups of working class college students at a public urban
university don't even know what the term means. That is, they think that liberals are the left. Why
do I mention this? Because I find it hard to grab hold of the premises of this forum. Instead of
asking "should the contemporary left campaign on this issue as part of a program for American
society?" I'm pulled to ask, "why should a gay and lesbian movement, whose component parts
number thousands and thousands of organizations in the U.S., give a second thought to a ‘left'
that, for the overwhelming majority of Americans, is hardly known to exist?"
As Christopher
Phelps reminds us, the Mattachine Society, the group whose founding launched a history of
continuous queer organizing in the U.S., owed its birth to a group of men with ties to the
Communist Party. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, critical figures in the radical gay and lesbian
liberation movement -- Carl Wittman, Charlotte Bunch, Allen Young are three names that come
to mind, but there were many more -- had roots in the New Left activism of the era and brought
those experiences and perspectives with them as they helped radicalize gay and lesbian politics.
Then, in the late 1980s, ACT UP chapters around the country not only had angry twenty-two-
year-olds at their overflow meetings, but also alumni of the radical social movements of the 1960s
and 1970s who invested AIDS organizing with militancy and with a politics that called attention
to systemic inequalities and oppression.
So, yes, in a sense,
the left can claim a critical role in what I consider the three most compelling, historically
significant moments in the gay and lesbian movement. Yet the movement's headiest periods have
neither been initiated nor carried out by left organizations and their leadership. Rather, they have
come from gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activists whose worldviews were shaped by
various left traditions but who worked outside the left.
Wonderful and
important as those three transforming moments were, none of them lasted long. After each of
them, as gay activism resettled into more mainstream or reformist or civil rights frameworks,
individual activists who saw themselves as leftists either went back to the left or tried to keep a
left analysis or program alive within the gay and lesbian movement. My own direct experience of
this history (rather than my retelling of it as a historian) came in the 1970s in the wake of the gay
liberation moment. I joined one of the many pre-party formations that grew out of the upheavals
of the sixties. The one I chose, the New Action Party, was completely unsuccessful in its
aspirations to become a political party, but it did provide me with wonderful mentoring from
impressive community organizers who were older than I.
At the same time, I
was part of a collective in New York called the Gay Socialist Action Project. We organized
"actions"; convened educational forums to talk about left analyses of gay oppression; and
mobilized visible gay contingents for events like the 1976 counter-Bicentennial demonstrations or
protest rallies outside the Democratic National Convention in New York City that summer. There
were equivalent gay men's groups in cities around the country -- San Francisco, Chicago, Boston,
D.C., Los Angeles and, I'm sure, others. I'd be hard pressed to claim that these grouplets did
many things of earth-shaking consequence. Leftist labels in themselves tended to marginalize us.
But we did function as a system of support and self-education among ourselves, cracking a
political isolation that tended to deepen with the rightward shift of the country. The connections
between us helped shape how some of us were able to be activists within the gay and lesbian and,
as the eighties moved into the nineties, bisexual and transgender movement.
Here's how the
above process played itself out with me. At some point, I decided to devote my activist energies
to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Of the various national gay groups, it was the one
that seemed most attached, even during the Reagan years, to the spirit of gay liberation. And it
seemed to attract, to both its staff and its board, folks who were now labeling themselves
"progressive." In concrete terms this meant an allegiance to community organizing and grassroots
mobilizations rather than to inside-the-Beltway lobbying. It meant an approach to gay politics that
always argued for interconnections between issues and between various forms of oppression.
Thus, when I chaired the board of NGLTF, we issued a statement opposing the Gulf War in 1991.
Later, when I became director of its Policy Institute, we issued position papers and took stands on
things like affirmative action, welfare reform, and immigration restriction. From inside the GLBT
movement, activists who thought of themselves as leftists worked consistently to magnify the
movement's lens so that segments of the movement at least stood for a vision of social justice
broader than a single-issue politics contained with a civil rights framework. But, again, we didn't
do this as members of a left organization. We did it from within the GLBT movement, as activists
who had a left-inspired vision of what social justice might look like.
At some point in
my twenties, I began to identify as a leftist. I did it for a combination of reasons. I came to believe
that capitalism (the private ownership of the means of production) would always produce
inequality and exploitation. I longed for an economic structure in which everybody had enough
(vague to you reading this, but clear to me what this means). I wanted a social structure in which
other systems of oppression and inequality would become artifacts of the past. Because I didn't
think that the latter (no racism, no sexism, no homophobia) would ever happen under capitalism, a
democratic socialist vision of a future society became mine. And, as I read more history,
especially about American radicalism, I was taken by the way that fighting for the underdog,
fighting for those who were persecuted and mistreated, seemed to be what motivated the people
who called themselves leftists.
So imagine now
how disorienting it is, for someone who thinks the left fights against injustice, to read one of the
questions guiding this forum: "Should the contemporary left campaign on this [i.e., gay] issue as
part of a program for American society?"
In the 1950s, it is
almost certain that more gay men and lesbians than leftists were the target of government
investigations and were fired from their jobs. In the 1960s, when leftists were enjoying expansive
possibilities for organizing mass protests, gay men and lesbians were routinely arrested in mass
sweeps by the police in major American cities. In Chicago, Mayor Daley's police force arrested a
lot more homosexuals than radicals. When the Chicago police murdered Black Panther leader
Fred Hampton, there were tons of protests, as there should have been. When, the following year,
police shot and killed James Clay, a black transvestite, not a peep of protest. Between 1961 and
1973, something like 58,000 American military personnel died in Southeast Asia. The war became
the central obsession of both the government and of a broad left. Between 1981 and 1993, more
than 58,000 Americans died of AIDS. The Reagan-Bush government had other things to occupy
their attention, and the left, if there was one, didn't make AIDS a rallying cry.
The point of the
preceding paragraph? It's hard for me to understand why, at this point in time, adherents of a
political tradition committed to fighting against oppression, to championing the underdog, and to
promoting justice and equality, would still be asking whether they should campaign on "this
issue." What needs to happen to a group of people before it becomes obvious to everyone that
they are the targets of systematic oppression?
In the early 1980s,
I published an essay titled "Capitalism and Gay Identity." It was an attempt to theorize a
materialist basis for the emergence of gay identities, communities, and politics in the U.S. across
the twentieth century. A key piece of the argument proposed that gay and lesbian communities
formed on social terrain outside the family and kinship networks. It was the system of wage labor
at the heart of capitalist social relations that allowed same-sex desire to congeal into an identity
and that made it possible for groups of such people to come together. I also argued that the
success of gay and lesbian liberation depended on fighting to expand that terrain, but not in the
harshly individualist ways of the capitalist market. Rather, it depended on constructing a society in
which the boundaries between family and community were porous, a social democratic society, if
you will, that offered security for all regardless of an individual's relationship to a heterosexual
family unit.
A GLBT
movement in the conservative climate of the twenty-first century campaigns on a single-issue
marriage-equality platform, and it becomes a mobilizing tool for the right. I suppose the left could
stand shoulder to shoulder with those gay activists who are obsessively fighting for marriage
rights. Or, it could propose, and then organize around, a comprehensive "family agenda" that
promises security for all the complex family forms that exist in the U.S. today. The "valuing all
families" approach to policy taken by someone like Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Gay
and Straight) Marriage, encourages a progressive democratic socialist politics of the family
that potentially builds coalition across lines of sexuality, ethnicity, race, and class.
In this first decade
of the twenty-first century, gay and lesbian life seems so visible and normalized. Ellen is a big star.
Mayor Richard Daley Jr. presides each year over the induction of new members into Chicago's
Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. President Bush jokes with Representative Barney Frank about
Frank's boyfriend. But, at the same time, young people who come out, or who betray signs of
transgressing gender and sexual identity boundaries, are subject to a level of ridicule, harassment,
and violence that was rare half a century ago, when the closet reigned supreme. I suppose the left
could add the issue of queer youth to its program for American society (Actually, I wish it would,
since these young folks could use all the allies they can get). Or the left could make the systematic
dismantling of public education by the right over the last generation the scandal that it is; offer a
comprehensive program for financing the education of our children; and have respect for all
young folks by the schools, regardless of sexual or gender identity, be a non-negotiable item.
Okay, so I know
there's something ridiculous about proposing in two short paragraphs big, complex, almost-
impossible-to-imagine-achieving programs. But the point is that there isn't a single significant
element of American politics and policy -- family, schooling, health care, national security -- in
which issues germane to GLBT folks don't surface organically. But the issues will surface among
leftists only if the left, whoever and whatever that is today, opens its eyes and ears to see and hear
the queers all around them. If the left is fundamentally about constructing a society without
exploitation and oppression, I don't see why or how gay issues would not be part of its program
for American society.
