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As I often do before I sit down to write an LGBT Literature diary, today I stood at my bookshelf looking for inspiration. I have been feeling—as have many of you, I’m sure—more than a little scared and hopeless in these first days of the Trump administration. A couple of books on the history of the gay press stood out as relevant, considering the nearly unprecedented disdain this administration has for the role of the media. Indeed, they may well be the subject of a future diary. But then my eyes fell upon a book on which I’d relied so often to write LGBT Literature (and history) posts, but had never been the subject of its own diary. I decided that, in this first LGBT Literature diary of 2017, it’s time to get back to basics with a book about the roots of the gay liberation movement. An inspiring book on the importance and value of protest, even when it seems that the world is against you (because it is)—what could possibly be more relevant in Trump’s America? And so I pulled John D’Emilio’s classic Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (1983) off the shelf and got to work.
Perhaps it speaks to how utterly foundational Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities is as a work of LGBT history that it had never even occurred to me to write a diary on it. D’Emilio’s book was a well from which I gathered material, but it seemed almost too basic to address in a diary of its own. That’s a very twenty-first century thing to say, because in the 1980s, this book paved the way. If there are “founders” of LGBT history, D’Emilio certainly qualifies. In many ways, much of LGBT historiography that exists today flows from D’Emilio’s early research. When I entered graduate school and decided to focus on LGBT history, the few LGBT historians in my program told me to read this book first. Today, whether it is a grad student looking to break into LGBT historiography, one of my ambitious undergrads (often LGBT themselves) who wants to learn more about their history, or a layperson just curious about a history they didn’t learn in school, I always point them to the same place: Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. From the brief press blurb:
With thorough documentation of the oppression of homosexuals and biographical sketches of the lesbian and gay heroes who helped the contemporary gay culture to emerge, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities supplies the definitive analysis of the homophile movement in the U.S. from 1940 to 1970.
In short, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities is about what is (and was) called the homophile movement, the pre-cursor to the gay liberation movement. Communist Party member Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950 (radical leftists played a major role in the early homophile movement), and Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin (and three other lesbian couples) founded the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis in 1955. These were the primary homophile organizations in the middle of the twentieth century, and they existed in an overwhelmingly anti-gay environment. D’Emilio argues that this movement, which was shaped both by World War II (which, as Allan Berube later argued in Coming Out Under Fire, was a watershed moment in gay and lesbian consciousness) and the anti-gay impact of McCarthyism (later explored by David K. Johnson in The Lavender Scare), laid the groundwork for the gay liberation movement that took shape following the Stonewall Riots of 1969. In other words, it took the uniquely awakening and oppressive historical moment of the postwar/Cold War years to spark such a movement. Central to this movement was the formation of modern gay and lesbian identity—or, as D’Emilio puts it, the construction of “a homosexual minority.” The widespread view among gays and lesbians that they constituted a persecuted minority was the foundation on which this political movement was built. While the homophile itself remained small and was not terribly effective in the 1950s, D’Emilio’s work casts them as the necessary building blocks of the much more expansive gay liberation movement to come in the 1970s.
Because so much has already been written both in this series and on Daily Kos more broadly about the homophile movement, this diary will focus less on the subject material of the book and more on the author and his work (and its historical context). In particular, I am going to draw from D’Emilio’s 1998 preface and afterword in the book’s second edition, in which he discusses the historical moment in which the book was produced and reflects on the trajectory of LGBT historical writing since its 1983 publication.
As both an LGBT person and a scholar, I have been (and remain) inspired by John D’Emilio, truly an activist scholar of LGBT history at a time when it was far from popular, and even dangerous to one’s career. I came of age and political consciousness in the early years of the vibrant civil rights movement that eventually led to the landmark Obergefell ruling. I came out in college and felt very deeply that my academic interests (first political science, then history) were intertwined with my politicization and activism as an LGBT person. I entered grad school in a very activist kind of way, feeling strongly that I had a political role to play as an LGBT historian. I also began my career at a time when LGBT history was an accepted, even in vogue, path to trod. I was well funded and had the support not only of my adviser, but the entire department. I had a broad LGBT historical literature from which I could draw and build on. D’Emilio, on the other hand, was a grad student at Columbia University in the 1970s, when the gay liberation movement was in full force but “gay history” was hardly a concept. In his 1976 Gay American History, Jonathan Ned Katz noted in the introduction that he knew of only two dissertations on LGBT history that had been approved by their respective departments. He continued, “The writers were both warned that they were risking their academic careers by taking up this topic; both went ahead nevertheless.” D’Emilio’s dissertation was probably one of them. D’Emilio, too, was very much shaped by the historical moment in which he lived. He writes in the preface:
By the time I came into the gay liberation movement early in 1973, I had managed to construct for myself a very full gay life. I had a lover, a wide circle of gay male friends, and a broad familiarity with the public institutions of the gay subculture in New York City...Entering the orbit of the political movement broadened my world...It gave a political edge to my identity as a gay man.
D’Emilio’s politics and scholarship were intertwined, and he saw them as feeding off of each other.
What this meant to me, and to others with whom I collaborated, was that research, writing, and scholarship became activities that counted for something, though not in their own right or detached from the world around them.
[...]
Deciding to write about the gay movement seemed the perfect choice. It appealed to my interests and to the “moment”: in the wake of the 1960s, the study of social movements had generated interest among historians, sociologists, and political scientists; besides, since gay liberation was profoundly changing the world around me, what could be more important than studying it? It had utility: uncovering the pre-Stonewall legacy of struggle would provide the contemporary movement with a wider angle of vision.
D’Emilio notes that, in the gay liberation years, liberationists often spoke of what came before Stonewall as a bleak wasteland. When he gained approval of the Columbia history department to begin his research, he thought he would spend at least half of his focus on Stonewall and the post-Stonewall years. The more he felt around in the dark and dug into this gay pre-history that had not yet been written, the more his focus shifted to the pre-Stonewall movement.
At some point...the organizing concept of the project shifted dramatically. I realized that the pre-Stonewall events, which I had originally imagined as somewhat akin to a preface to the “real” story of gay liberation, had a historical integrity of their own. They were, in short, significant enough to be placed at the center of what I was writing. The homophile movement, as the participants called it, had many of the earmarks of other social change movements in their early phases: visionary founders; hard times and tribulations; serious debates over philosophy, strategy, and tactics; victories that mattered. Hence, I determined that the book ought properly to stop with the Stonewall Riots in order to highlight more effectively the distinctive character and contribution of the activists of a preceding generation.
Indeed, a central message of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities is quite simple (even quaint) to twenty-first century readers: Gay history did not begin with Stonewall. Again, this seems like a basic, indisputable concept. Since 1983, a wealth of historical literature has been written on LGBT people in the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. Periods of early American gay history touched upon by the book (such as World War II and McCarthyism) have been vastly expanded upon in the years following its publication. In fact, as a grad student, I was sometimes frustrated at the relative dearth of writing on the post-Stonewall years. We take pre-Stonewall gay history for granted now, but we take it for granted largely because of D’Emilio. He acknowledges this in his 1998 afterword, in which he states:
...suffice it to say, in the last fifteen years we have moved far beyond “it didn’t start with Stonewall.” At least for the twentieth century, historians are creating a multilayered, many-voiced account of a collective gay and lesbian life as complex and subtle as those we already have for ethnic and racial groups in the United States.
D’Emilio also reflects in the afterword on another major theme of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, which is the centrality of socially constructed identity to the gay political movement. His work is certainly social constructionist in that he argues that what we know (or, at least, knew in the 1970s) as contemporary gay and lesbian identity is not ahistorical and is instead the product of a unique time and place. Social constructionists have argued that, while homosexuality itself has always existed, homosexual identity has its roots in the late nineteenth century with the medicalization of homosexuality (insert obligatory Foucault reference here). D’Emilio argues, however, that what came about in the 1950s was something different, and that homophile activists constructed modern gay identity in the shadow of the postwar years and McCarthyist oppression. The idea that identity (and not just sexual identity) is fluid, too, is sort of taken for granted today. However, D’Emilio also notes in his afterword that “essentialism” still has a central place in gay political language, which I think still holds today:
Ironically, even though social construction and its intellectual progeny seem, over the last two decades, to have swept essentialism from the playing field of humanistic and social scientific study, the essentialist notion that gays constitute a fixed minority of people different in some inherent way has more credibility in American society than ever before. It is the routine assumption of most gay and lesbian activists. It has sparked a mass of scientific research in search of the gay gene, the gay hypothalamus, gay twins, or other such biological evidence concerning the origins of homosexuality. Liberal allies of the gay community phrase their support of civil rights in terms of the belief that homosexuals are born that way, that there always were and always will be gays and lesbians. In other words, the core assumptions at the heart of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and most of the more recent historical studies are overlooked, even as the content of the history—the fascinating lives, the heroic struggles, the fierce oppression—are embraced and absorbed.
However, D’Emilio admits that his own argument about the construction of gay identity has been complicated by later scholarship. He cites George Chauncey’s Gay New York (which describes the gay male world of the early twentieth century in New York and might be the subject of a future LGBT Literature diary), and I would add Margot Canaday’s The Straight State, which moves the narrative back to the 1930s, when the American government began to take an interest in regulating homosexuality.
As for the other central theme of the book, that the activism of homophile activists both mattered and set the stage for Stonewall and gay liberation, D’Emilio also reflects on that in his afterword:
It would be very hard, I think, to dispute the first half of this proposition after having read the preceding account. But the issue is not whether the work made a difference, but how and to what degree. Can one claim, as I did, that the roots of Stonewall and gay liberation can only be understood in the light of homophile activism? Is there a direct and strong line of influence between the work of this generation and what occurred in the wake of Stonewall?
D’Emilio is less certain about that than he was in the book itself, noting that it needs further study. Indeed, he even floats the idea that Stonewall is best understood not as a watershed moment in history, but as a broader period of history in the late sixties and early seventies—in other words, that “Stonewall” is bigger than Stonewall the event.
Regardless of whether or not we can draw a direct line from homophile activism to gay liberation (and I tend to think that we can in many ways), these folks who toiled in the horribly oppressive 1950s matter. And they matter historically largely because of John D’Emilio’s pioneering work in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. There is a reason this book is considered foundational to the field, and it merits a place on the bookshelf of anybody interested in LGBT history. I find renewed inspiration in the homophile activists as we enter the Trump era. We are going to need a great deal of hope in the months and years ahead, and one way to gain that hope is to look back at our history.
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