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As an academic subfield of history, LGBT history is still rather young. However, it has been around long enough for a conventional narrative to develop. This is a narrative that is oversimplified, yes, but is nevertheless taught whenever LGBT history works its way into your standard freshman U.S. history survey (which is depressingly rare as it is). It’s a narrative that, as an LGBT historian myself, I have been guilty of teaching to undergraduates, even if I do try to add wrinkles and complications where I can.
That narrative goes something like this: Gay organizing really got underway in the 1950s, when it was vibrant but still at the margins through the 1960s. After the Stonewall Riots of 1969, gay organizing exploded, especially on the coasts. That gave way to a radical gay liberation movement that was intertwined with the New Left, anti-war, and racial identity movements happening at the same time. Gay liberationists connected their struggle with the struggle against capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism, envisioning nothing short of social revolution. But then, as the broader New Left fizzled out, so too did the gay liberation movement. Gay radicalism waned, and by the mid-1970s, the gay political movement focused on a civil rights reform agenda. Then came the dark age of the 1980s and the rise of the New Right, until AIDS revived gay activism, which leads into the queer activism of the 1990s.
Of course, you don’t need to be a professional historian to know that the above narrative is grossly oversimplified. Sometimes, simple narratives are appropriate and necessary—i.e., in a freshman history survey. That was one of the most difficult transitions I made from grad student to instructor, stifling my burning desire to complicate everything (a good way to make a freshman’s eyes glaze over). And simple narratives often contain more than a kernel of truth. But other times, these kinds of oversimplified narratives are just...wrong. Sometimes, they skip over and forget important historical people and events and even entire swaths of history, until somebody comes along and provides a correction.
That seems to be the motivation behind Emily K. Hobson’s new book Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left, which questions and pokes serious holes in the above narrative. This is a fairly short book considering how much it manages to do—in fact, I barely know where to start when writing this review, and I am sure that I am not going to do the book justice. I am not going to attempt to completely summarize the book, because I will fail at that endeavor. Instead, I am am going discuss Hobson’s main points, central arguments, and major contributions to LGBT (and broader social movement) history. I am also going to dwell a bit on the book’s epilogue, because I think what Hobson has to say about the future of social movement organizing will be quite relevant and interesting to readers here at Daily Kos.
Lavender and Red is all about disrupting that conventional narrative of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the gay movement is often remembered as being “single-issue” (I admit, I do not like this word choice, because in this case the “single issue” of gay civil rights is life-or-death) and, yes, whitewashed. This is a narrative that rests on what Hobson calls “Stonewall exceptionalism.” In other words, the general understanding is that the Stonewall Riots were the singular event that sparked the gay liberation movement, which only lasted a few years after Stonewall. Hobson focuses on one geographical area: the Bay Area, where gay and lesbian organizing—as well as radical movements—flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. The Bay Area, according to the book, was a center of gay and lesbian radical organizing well after the supposed end of the gay liberation movement. Hobson’s central argument is that gay and lesbian radicalism did not end in the early 1970s (nor did it begin with Stonewall). In the years following the dissolution of the Gay Liberation Front and broader New Left, gay and lesbian radicals continued to organize and link their struggle with the larger struggle of the international left. “Lavender and Red,” the title of the book, was a metaphor for this idea. Gay and lesbian radicals in the Bay Area connected their own gender and sexual oppression with U.S. imperialism and colonialism. Not only that, but they explicitly sought to build alliances with other radical movements, from the Black Panthers to the Central American solidarity movement. They believed that true revolution would only come through a multi-issue coalition linking race, gender, sexuality, and anti-imperialism. The importance of intersectional organizing, in other words, is at the heart of this book. Hobson further explains the twin concepts of “liberation” and “solidarity” from the book’s subtitle:
One means by which this book tracks [gay and lesbian radical] politics is through the keywords “liberation” and “solidarity,” which roughly mirror the metaphor of “lavender and red” to describe the goal of bridging sexual politics with an international left. At the height of the late 1960s, gay and lesbian radicals adapted the concept of liberation from black and anti-colonial movements. In calling for “gay liberation” and “lesbian feminist liberation,” they sought not just rights or inclusion but a fundamental transformation in the meanings of sexuality, a wholesale end to sexual limits and norms. They pursued liberation through political activism and through art and performance, by building a counterculture, and by rethinking sex itself. Gay and lesbian leftists described themselves as the true proponents of a liberation agenda and often laid claim as its true inheritors, not just because they pursued it intensely but because they defined it as interconnected with “solidarity.” they argued that sexual liberation could be won only through a broader social revolution and that, conversely, sexual liberation was a necessary part of revolutionary change. Further, they held that because gay and lesbian liberation challenged both material structures of oppression and leftist hostility, it could be won only through mutual support across difference. Solidarity described a day-to-day habit of activism: the work of showing up at protests, joining campaigns, and building a culture of political camaraderie. In simple terms, liberation was the theory and solidarity the practice.
Lavender and Red is divided into three distinct sections. The first section deals with the emergence of gay and lesbian radicalism in the late 1960s, which happened in the context of already existing homophile organizing (which a younger generation of gay activists saw as outdated respectability politics) and flourishing radicalism (black liberation and anti-Vietnam War organizing). Gay radicals in the Bay Area applied the idea of “internal colonialism” (a concept taken from the Black Panthers) to their own social situation, utilizing the term “gay ghetto” to attempt to draw connections between gay and black liberation. They also connected themselves to the anti-war movement. Hobson opens Chapter 1 with a fascinating anecdote about a 1969 performance titled “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer,” staged by the Gay Liberation Theater:
We’re not going to fight in an army that discriminates against us. . . . Nor are we going to fight for a country that will not hire us and fires us. . . . We are going to fight for ourselves and our lovers in places like Berkeley where the Berkeley police last April murdered homosexual brother Frank Bartley (never heard of him?) while cruising in Aquatic Park.
They went on to call it “queer, unnatural and perverse” to “send men half way round the world to kill their brothers while we torment, rape, jail and murder men for loving their brothers here.” Hobson further explains gay liberationists’ attempt to link gayness with anti-imperialism:
Gay liberationists pushed back against both the US state and their fellow radicals by politicizing homosexuality and effeminacy as means to resist the war. At their campiest, they riffed on the call to “make love, not war” with slogans such as “send the troops to bed together” and “suck cock to beat the draft”; more earnestly, they reframed gayness not only as a sexuality but also as a politics of opposition to US militarism and empire.
They also tried to act in solidarity with the Black Panthers, taking special note when Huey Newton praised women’s and gay liberation:
There is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying “even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.” Quite the contrary; maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.
In the wake of these comments, a substantive attempt was made to cement a formal gay alliance with the Black Panthers, which ultimately ended in failure. But the real importance of this is that gay and lesbian activists saw interconnectedness with other radical movements as key to true revolution.
It is in this section of the book that Hobson adds richness to an episode of gay history that I often teach in my U.S. history survey. Whenever I discuss gay liberation in class, I like to bring up the attempted “gay takeover” of the sparsely populated Alpine County, California. The idea was to send enough gay people to this county to build a “gay homeland” or “Stonewall Nation”: a “gay territory . . . a gay government, a gay civil service, a county welfare department which made public assistance payments to the refugees from persecution and injustice.” This Gay Liberation Front project was mostly political theater, but it also sparked controversy within the gay and lesbian left. Hobson explains:
Alpine was “open” only in project leaders’ imaginations: it was home both to Anglo residents and to a few hundred members of the Washoe tribe, whose land straddles eastern California and northern Nevada. Alpine leaders declared themselves friends of Washoe people even as they sought to conquer Washoe land.
This caused a split, and many Bay Area radicals saw this project as “racist, sexist, impractical and counterrevolutionary nationalist” or a reproduction of the “gay ghetto.” Gay leftists rejected this kind of a project as counter to their goal of building solidarity for revolution.
This first section also discusses lesbian feminism during the early 1970s and how it used the Black Panther concept of “collective defense” to respond not only to gendered violence and rape but also the violence of the U.S. state. Hobson explains:
Lesbian feminist collective defense was not the same as armed resistance, and indeed, many who engaged in a rhetoric or practice of collective defense opposed or were critical of armed groups. But collective defense did align with the “radical underground,” a set of strategies and networks used to organize clandestinely and to evade arrest or prosecution for political activity, including but not limited to armed struggle. Going underground included living in hiding, operating under an alias, and moving from place to place. Defense of the underground gained significantly more adherents than did armed activity itself, in part because some underground tactics were initiated in draft resistance and tied to the pacifist movement, and also because even those innocent of criminal charges might feel compelled to evade the state.
Between this lesbian feminist support for and participation in the radical underground and the gay liberationist attempt to build bridges with the black liberation and anti-war movements, gay and lesbian radicalism emerged as a coherent ideology tying sexual liberation to a broader left solidarity. It is in the first section of the book that Hobson shatters the “Stonewall exceptionalism” that has dominated much of gay history.
The second section of Lavender and Red then follows that thread of gay and lesbian radicalism into the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it is not supposed to really exist. Indeed, as Hobson shows, gay radicalism continued to flourish in the Bay Area. During this period, radical activists continued to build multi-issue coalitions in opposition to state violence and imperialism. While gay activists fought against the social conservatism of the emerging New Right, gay leftists connected this social conservatism with the anti-communist foreign policy of the New Right. In particular, they identified South and Central Americans impacted by U.S. intervention (in Chile and Nicaragua) as fellow victims of the U.S. state. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, gay and lesbian radicals saw the Central American solidarity movement as a way to build a multiracial alliance. Gay and lesbian leftists not only took part in the movement, but they saw at as their own cause.
As solidarity grew, gay and lesbian radicals began not only to join existing groups but also to formulate their own responses—that is, to form a specifically lesbian and gay solidarity. In June 1978 Roberto Guardian, Charlie Hinton, and other activists from the Gay Latino Alliance and Bay Area Gay Liberation collaborated to produce “Strange Bedfellows,” an evening of political theater and discussion that linked the fight for gay and lesbian freedom in the United States to self-determination in Zimbabwe and Nicaragua. Organizers highlighted political alliances between Somoza, Ian Smith (a white supremacist controlling Zimbabwe under the banner of Rhodesia, which took its name from the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes), and California state senator John Briggs (author of the anti-gay Proposition 6 and the death penalty measure Proposition 7). They termed Somoza, Smith, and Briggs “fascists” who expressed “the last gasps of empire” and were a “COMMON ENEMY” to multiple communities—gay, lesbian, and straight, white and of color, globally and inside the United States.
A note here: Hobson not only illuminates the strength of intersectional organizing, but also the difficulty. We know about the major gay and lesbian victory in the Proposition 6 fight in 1978, but it is lesser known that Proposition 7 overwhelmingly passed, reaffirming the death penalty. Hobson highlights this as a failure to intersectionally organize, even if it was on the radar of some gay and lesbian radicals.
The gay and lesbian support for the Nicaraguan Revolution was also intertwined with AIDS, which is something the third section of the book tackles. Gay and lesbian radicals saw the Sandinista government as prioritizing AIDS work while the Reagan administration did not act. This is another way in which Hobson corrects the conventional gay historical narrative:
The birth of direct action against AIDS is usually attributed solely to AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, founded in March 1987 in New York City.
[...]
AIDS direct action found multiple and overlapping sources around the United States. In the Bay Area, it was initiated by gay and lesbian radicals whose histories ranged from gay liberation through Central American solidarity. As early as 1983, the Lesbian and Gay Task Force of the campaign for Project N, an initiative that declared San Francisco’s opposition to US intervention in El Salvador, adopted the slogan “Money for AIDS, Not War.”
As you can tell just from this (not-so-) brief summary of the book, Lavender and Red covers a great deal of ground in its short 200 pages. The above summary barely scratches the surface and, I’m afraid, does not do it justice. Hobson succeeds in painting a rich portrait of a vibrant gay and lesbian left that flourished in the Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s and saw itself as connected to the international left. I am left wondering about gay and lesbian radicalism outside of the Bay Area, which Hobson admits is quite unique. In other words, while Hobson convinces me that there was a vibrant and strong gay and lesbian left in the Bay Area, I am left wondering how at-the-margins it was or was not on the national level. In the meantime, the book has certainly made me rethink the way I write and teach LGBT history and has added some very necessary complications to that standard narrative.
Perhaps most interesting to Daily Kos readers would be the epilogue, which discusses not only the receding of gay radicalism, but also the future of radical organizing. Hobson argues that the end of the Cold War was the point at which gay radicalism faded into the background and dropped out of our historical memory:
The displacement of anti-militarism and anti-imperialism in gay, lesbian, and queer politics was driven both by the losses wrought by AIDS...and by the supposed defeat of socialism at the end of the Cold War. With the left as a whole in upheaval, the United States’s already minimal commitments to social welfare—though under attack since the 1970s—became further decimated by neoliberal policies built on privatization, “personal responsibility,” and “law and order.”
[...]
The changes of the 1990s and 2000s divided a good deal of gay and lesbian rights work from the agendas of economic, racial, and reproductive justice. National gay and lesbian organizations (gradually, though unevenly, including bisexual and transgender people and issues) gained influence while prioritizing military inclusion and marriage equality, goals that many radicals criticized as heteronormative. Advocates increasingly won recognition by defining gay and lesbian identities as merely personal differences rather than as means to challenge privatization or state violence.
Because of their confrontational tactics, 1990s groups such as Queer Nation are sometimes remembered as “radical.” Hobson argues just the opposite in her epilogue—1990s gay rights goals (military inclusion, hate crime legislation, eventually marriage equality) were completely at odds with the goals of gay and lesbian radicals of years past. Inclusion within the state rather than resistance against the state became the dominant strain of queer politics by the 1990s. In Hobson’s view, LGBT rights activism became siloed, and the coalition-building gay radicals tried to accomplish in the 1970s and 1980s fell by the wayside.
Beyond describing the “end” of gay radicalism, Hobson considers the future. It is here that she sees hope for a renewed multi-issue solidarity. She notes contemporary queer activism within immigrant organizing, prison reform, Palestinian solidarity, and Black Lives Matter as examples. Hobson ends the book:
Ultimately, the history of the gay and lesbian left underscores the transformative potential of sexual politics and of the rethinking of identity writ large. Identity can summon powerful affiliations with others precisely because it can be continually remade. This malleability is both an opportunity and a challenge; now as in the past, queer people who are privileged by race, nation, or class may not see themselves as “getting free” with others who do not look like them, live like them, or experience police stops and border checkpoints as they do. As privileges expand for some, previous radical affiliations will surely change. Yet we can seize new affiliations, and make new futures, by understanding and critically using our queer pasts.
Immediately after finishing Lavender and Red, I could not help but be reminded of a 2015 editorial in The Advocate, in the aftermath of Ferguson, which I thought at the time (and still think) was quite powerful:
In the outcry against police brutality happening so clearly along race lines, I kept hearing something in my head: My feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit. The phrase comes from a pithy title to a wild essay by Flavia Dzodan. And I kept thinking about snappy ways to turn that into a phrase about how our LGBT activism will be intersectional or it will be illegitimate. I’m still working on the wording, but I’m hoping the sentiment is clear.
Yet the question remains: Will our advocacy be real and encompass all people who face marginalization and oppression, or will it be bullshit?
The lessons from Lavender and Red on the strengths and limitations of intersectional organizing seem even more important as we enter the Trump era.
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