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Libbing it up

Liberation now!
The GLF wasn’t fueled just by “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” It saw itself as part of a worldwide political movement committed to both national and international social justice. Its very name — Gay Liberation Front — came from the newly formed Woman’s Liberation Front, which in turn was taken from the North Vietnamese’s National Liberation Front and the various calls for black liberation that had spun off from the civil-rights movement. These queer activists pursued coalitions with a wide range of progressive political groups, including the Black Panthers, National Organization of Women, anti–Vietnam War groups, and labor unions. Not all of these coalitions were successful — although Huey Newton, the Black Panthers leader, quite vocally supported gay liberation — but they marked the beginning of a coalition-based movement for gay rights that could have become larger and stronger. In many ways, the GLF had its roots in quasi-religious 19th-century-American utopian movements, such as Robert Dale Owen’s New Harmony, and John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community. These communities were both abolitionist and pro-women’s-suffrage, while wedded to the ideas of personal freedom and group responsibility for social justice. For all its internationalism, at heart, the GLF was profoundly American.

But by the early 1970s, more-moderate, strategically limited, gay organizations formed. These groups — Gay Activists Alliance and National Gay Task Force were the largest (the now-powerful and very single-issue-centered Human Rights Campaign was not formed until almost a decade later) — focused on the far more narrowly defined concept of “gay rights.” They argued that freedom for gay men and lesbians would be best achieved not by addressing anti-gay discrimination as part of a larger pattern of discrimination in the US, but by focusing on specific legal inequalities that only affected homosexuals. This strategy resulted in a mindset of strict legalism that severely hindered the gay movement’s growth and effectiveness.

The singular theme of the more limited, rights-based movement was that “gay people were just like everyone else,” by which it meant “heterosexuals.” This was a definitively wrong move, one based on the ridiculous notion that heterosexuals themselves were all alike, with no differences — class, racial, ethnic, sexual — among them. Accordingly, the equal-rights model assumed that all homosexual people were also a single group with no internal differences. The gay-rights movement not only ignored the myriad differences within each group; more important, it ignored the shared similarities — and potential points of connection — that existed between the groups.

As a result, the gay-rights movement became culturally and politically isolated, as liberalism in the ’70s and ’80s gave way to identity politics. By focusing only on legal inequalities — albeit, an important aspect of seeking basic civil rights — the movement never argued, as the African-American civil-rights movement did by the end of Martin Luther King’s life, for a comprehensive vision of social justice.

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