GAY LIBERATION: HOW THE MOVEMENT HAS GROWN; HOW THE ISSUES HAVE CHANGED

© 1984, by Stuart Norman


This article was published in #39, Summer ‘84, “Retrospective For a Decade.”
I believe that this article still stands as good now as the day it was written.


        Since this issue is the tenth year retrospective, I have been looking back on our movement - where we’ve been and where we’re going, how we’ve changed tactics and ideologies. From the “love that dare not speak its name", to the “love that won’t shut up.”
        The modern gay movement did not begin in 1969 with the Stonewall riots. It has a foundation going back many years. The modern phase of the movement certainly was born after Stonewall in the end of a decade that had seen the turmoil over an unpopular war and the Civil Rights movements. Such dissent had never before been seen in our country. There was a new feeling in the air, a light shining through, clearing away the old ways of the 1950’s dark age. Freedom and individualism were on the rise. Old values had been questioned and found lacking in humanity. The foundations of our society were under attack from within. Yet we were only trying to fulfill the American Dream of freedom and respect for individual rights. Hypocrisy was being purged as we saw who we really were through the grids of new leftist ideology and Aquarian brotherly love. Thus we find in the early days of the gay movement a strident rhetoric and connections with socialistic ideology and the new left. The literature of liberation was full of it. But there also was political naiveté' and unbridled idealism. The gay movement was caught up in the civil rights, antiwar, anti-draft, anti-Capitalist, feminist and ecological ideology.
        Now that is past history, and the country has turned toward a conservative bent. We gays have changed, too. We have become an ethnic group united by tastes, styles, behaviors, beliefs, and of course, sexuality. We are gay, not just homosexuals. That is a new phenomena in the historical world. And we are still defining ourselves, however, we have a long way to go.
        We have seen the styles of behavior change in our community during the past decade. The stereotype of the effeminate man or butch woman is dying. The eternal femme (old fairy queen) and youthism is declining as we mature. We can observe in the personals the acceptance of rising age and every type of body. However, we still like good bodies. We are more free to be ourselves as openly gay people.
        Gays have attained commercial power and political sophistication. However, we may be losing some of the ideals such as the need for complete cultural change - ending sexism, racism, and the convention of patriarchy. It was good to hear this ideal reiterated by Virginia Apuzzo, Executive Director of the National Gay Task Force, in her keynote address to the Southeastern Conference for Lesbians and Gay Men in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 14.
        In the intervening years since 1969, we gays have moved from political ideologies of mass liberation to personal liberation as the Human Potential Movement flowered. It was a move from mass consciousness to the individual. We found out how to accept ourselves as good and healthy human beings in various forms of consciousness raising. We gained a self-confidence from rooting out internalized oppression so that we could act freely. With that knowledge we now understand that education (or reeducation) of ourselves and society is more important than political rhetoric or action in
achieving liberation. Then in 1977, Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in Florida politicized us to the realities of our society. From that we saw the importance of working within the system to gain our rights.
Politics must follow education. Knowledge and information are required before correct and effective political action.
        
        At this point I feel is a good time to examine and criticize the political thought that our movement has inherited, and the changes within it. It was the economic freedom of consumer capitalism and the right of free speech that allowed our movement to grow. We must always be aware that individual freedom is needed first. Both economic and civil freedoms go together, cannot be separated. And those freedoms are ours. A government is a protector of rights in its proper role, but it cannot grant rights which are inherent only in individuals. It can, however, take them away by force. But by how much do we give up our rights by internalized oppression or by laziness and thus not act on them? And by that we lose them. A few gay people have acted and all of us have gained by it.
        That our movement has gained the power it has might seem a contradiction to its leftist founders. Yet we must see what we are fighting, and ideologies sometime obscure clear sight. We are fighting homophobia and sexism, both which run deep in our culture as integral parts. Homophobia is a weakness, a fear of same-sex relations by so-called straights. It is separative. Sexism causes people to be viewed as sexual objects (especially women), and sex is a commodity to be sold. But our movement is based on love and the right to love freely. That is what the sexist attitude destroys and patriarchal society directs toward perpetuating itself.
        Straight society fears homosexuality often without consciously knowing why. There is a deep, hidden knowledge that same-sex relationships will destroy the sexist role hegemony on which western society is founded. Thus we gays are a threat to the family, roles of women and men, and to competition. The New Right is correct about that.
        We must understand that the political realm is based on the psycho-social realm, thus politics reflects cultural beliefs and itself is not a revolutionary agent for cultural/social change. Political revolution will not solve the problem of sexism or of fascist authoritarianism and patriarchy. The causes lie deeper. All oppression is fascistic, arising from psychological repression or internalized oppression in the individual. But it is cultural and learned and so expresses in the masses as unfreedom (fear of freedom and responsibility) and political oppression. Thus in our culture both women and men are responsible for the patriarchy. Both compete within and without their respective social roles.
        It was the height of naiveté' and perhaps greed on the part of both socialists and capitalists to assume that politics could bring freedom and true liberation. In our time we have seen the failure of both to bring about the millennium, but they could bring on the apocalypse. Capitalism and Socialism are outmoded, 19th century rationalistic philosophies, having no basis in the spiritual. They are secular socioeconomic theories founded on the win/lose paradigm of poverty consciousness, which states that there is never enough for everyone. Both originated in patriarchal consciousness, and both have become authoritarian religions. Neither fosters freedom. Capitalism fosters competition, a masculine concept, and forces inequality. Socialism conceived as a corrective, fosters a feminist cooperation, but forces a mass equality denying individualism. So within our culture both are forums for coercion, and either will sacrifice the masses or the individual. The cultural chauvinism is germane to both. I could continue this comparison, but I think the foregoing is sufficient to make my case.
        The problem is cultural , not political. What we need first is personal liberation and the courage to live our rights even if we must live in the loopholes of society, as we gays have. We can rid ourselves of internalized oppression and live as freely as we wish, willing to take the consequences of our beliefs and actions. Then we can change our culture, and politics will follow. We need to forge bonds built on consensus rather than opposition and majority rule. We must learn to relate in nonhierarchical modes.
        For now we can join forces with the ecological, anti-nuke, antiwar and New Age factions to forge a coalition of thought for cultural change based in spiritual values. The age of pessimism, mass destruction and sacrifice must end. Yet for awhile we must also work within the system, hammering away at its discriminatory laws. We have a goal to end sexism and abolish the patriarchy, but to accomplish this first we must work for gay rights. We need our politicians in place within the system. Politics is a two way street, so we can demonstrate to politicians that they need us. Once our rights are protected by law we can use the law, our knowledge and understanding to subvert the predominant culture.
        We have just begun our work building the New Age.


Contents Faery Sexuality, Faerie Politics Introduction