What’s Left of the Gay Left? | The Pot Magaze

Contents:

• THE POT: THE GAY-JE
• GAY RIGHTS MOVEMENT
• GAY POTS
• UNRSTANDG GAY & LBIAN INTI
• WHERE TO GO WHEN IM YOUNG GAY? - AMSTERDAM FOM

THE POT: THE GAY-JE

Ntled the fort on Ontar's south ast, The POINT is a premiere Campg rort and safe space for gay and bisexual men. It’s a strikg and likely untertuive qutn for 2018, when marriage equaly is the law of the land and gay people occupy proment posns nearly every field of enavor.

GAY RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Growg up Kansas the early 2000s, I associated gay liberatn wh noisy radils who didn’t have fai, and gay pri ralli wh distasteful displays of overcharged sexualy. I was ep what scholars ll the glass closet: though many iends saw me as gay, I remaed unattuned to my sexualy, unaware of the source of my teenage angst.

Now, I am an out gay man and a queer historian to boot—an unthkable prospect for a doctoral ndidate at a prtig universy only a generatn ago. I do not live fear of sodomy laws, now funct thanks to the gay movement, and while I am not married, I have gay iends who are and whose liv are better for .

That is the qutn posed by Mart Duberman, doyen of Amerin gay history, Has the Gay Movement Failed?, a tour force of queer history, sexology, and polics sce the end of the Send World War. Duberman ntends that sce the Seventi, the gay movement has volved om one screamg “change the system! ” To someone like me, whose life experienc so flatly ntradict the book’s headle argument, he would undoubtedly rebut: you are cis-genred, whe, well-ted, and male— short, precisely the kd of person for whom the gay movement (and the entire socenomic system we hab) was signed to succeed.

GAY POTS

Some of those groups who today feel exclud om the mastream gay movement were prent at s birth. Johnson, were the vanguard of the 1969 Stonewall rts and helped to found the Gay Liberatn Front (or GLF) New York Cy soon thereafter.

Though GLF only ever reprented a ty actn of the Amerin gay populatn and existed om 1969 until 1972, Duberman views as a font of radil creativy, an exemplar of everythg that today’s gay movement is not. Duberman lot sadomasochism as a particular source of acrimony between gay men, who believed to be a liberatory sexual practice, and lbians, who wanted no part “eroticizg vlence. Likewise, while GLF was largely anti-palist, the alliance of socialism and gay liberatn never sat easy.

The Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party, and the Young Socialist Alliance were all homophobic stutns: Duberman pots out that the Amerin Communist Party expelled gay anizer Harry Hay 1951. The Gay Liberatn Front self eventually dissolved, torn apart by s “stcturels stcture” and s abily to appeal to diverse nstuenci wh the queer fay. “The ty number of blacks and Latos GLF soon mped to new radil formatns for people of lor, like Third World Gay Revolutn, ” Duberman wr:.

UNRSTANDG GAY & LBIAN INTI

The lbian mory GLF nclud that their gay male “brothers” were pable of treatg them as more than distant s; even those of goodwill proved more fortable beg around men than women. A sizable group of “liberal”—as opposed to “radil”—gay men cid, after all, that they preferred reprentative to pure mocracy, Robert’s Rul to creative anarchism, and equal rights “thgs as they are” rather than workg toward “thgs as they might be. ” In 1973 they formed the Natnal Gay Task Force—only belatedly addg the word “Lbian”—and set out to lobby for an end to discrimatn (rather than an end to jtice).

Not only did a new gay movement arise to fight for the muny’s survival agast the hostile Reagan admistratn (the most famo of the groups was ACT UP), but also turned agast the sexual liberatn of the 1970s. The llapse of gay radilism, bed wh the dismissal of sexual revolutn, ma possible the “marriage csa” that Duberman ris.

WHERE TO GO WHEN IM YOUNG GAY? - AMSTERDAM FOM

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC)—the untry’s largt gay rights anizatn today wh a membership of over three ln and an annual budget of over $40 ln—first me to beg 1980 unr the name Gay Rights Natnal Lobby. The HRC’s succs and s foc on marriage has, Duberman’s opn, draed the gay muny of radil iative, focg s energy on ftg . The shift om tearg down patriarchal stutns to adaptg to them has, Duberman’s view, fundamentally weakened and narrowed the gay rights movement to the triment of queer people who are not middle-class, whe, and male.

Duberman’s history of GLF, his clear-eyed asssment of s radilism, s shortgs, and s utopian tragedy, is one of the great thgs about Has the Gay Movement Failed?