Queerness Considered

As the Supreme Court deliberated over same-sex marriage last year, Facebook News Feeds were flooded by equal signs. Less noticeable was the victory symbol, the two lines of the equal sign smushed together to form a “V.”

The sine qua non of the social media provocateur, the “V” represented an unsparing critique of today’s gay rights paradigm. Attacked from the left by self-styled “radical queers,” the model has been faulted for its emphasis on reform and integration. Latching onto the slogan “assimilation is not liberation” and hearkening to a glorious past, the queers have appointed themselves guardians of LGBT identity, insisting on retaining the early movement’s destabilizing mission.

Historically, their claims make some sense. Before the term “homosexuality” had even been coined, LGBT people, particularly gay men, were linked to counterculture. Victorian-era Britain was scandalized by the 1871 trial of “Fanny” and “Stella,” two cross-dressers who had become notorious for their exploits in London’s West End. The dandyish Oscar Wilde, brought up on charges of gross indecency two decades later, forever associated “the love that dare not speak its name” with effeminacy and epicenism. Positing same-sex attraction as the consequence of inverted gender expression, the emerging field of sexology buttressed these popular notions.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, much homosexual activity occurred out of sight—in subway restrooms, bath houses, and parks—until the specter of anti-sodomy laws and prejudice was overcome at Stonewall. During this time of shadow, LGBT folks of influence existed, perhaps imperceptibly, in the cultural avant-garde and the political vanguard. Susan Sontag, in her essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” called gays “aristocrats of taste.” Camp, their aesthetic sensibility, privileged style over content, bended gender roles, and reveled in ostentation, emotionality, and the subversion of objects. (Tin Pan Alley, which I discussed a short time ago, is one example Sontag cites.) “Neutraliz[ing] moral indignation, sponsor[ing] playfulness,” camp challenged cultural norms and served as a form of self-legitimization for gays.

While camp was implicitly political, the milieu anti-assimilationist queerness sprung out of was anything but. The Mattachine Society, the first organization in the U.S. to advocate the public acceptance of homosexuality, drew its leadership from the ranks of the American Communist Party. Harry Hay, the group’s founder, was inspired by Marxism-Leninism’s treatment of blacks as a national minority deserving of their own polity. Though consigned to the margins of the Old Left, he argued for a kind of autonomy for homosexuals, whom he thought possessed a common language and culture.

Following the advent of the New Left, Hays’s ideological children established the Gay Liberation Front. Devoted to the dethroning of traditional mores, or, as its members said, the “complete sexual liberation of all people,” the GLF cast its lot with other radical struggles, such as black nationalism, anti-capitalism, and anti-colonial movements. This ideology, melded with the camp aesthetic and its epigones, came to form the LGBT identity that today’s radical queers would enshrine as normative.

In “The Politics of Being Queer,” Paul Goodman described this as a doctrine of “indivisible freedom” and lambasted homosexuals who identified as apolitical or conservative. In truth, this is a doctrine of intolerable control and determinism. In the same way Bruno Bauer asked too much of German Jews by demanding they seek the overthrow of the Christian state instead of equal rights within it, queerness exhorts LGBT people to yoke their own advancement to the emancipation of others. It’s also highly impractical. Successful American social movements follow an assimilationist praxis; minorities are rewarded for pursuing inclusion under the Republic’s values, and are stymied for not doing so.

Most egregiously, queerness attempts to graft political and cultural allegiances onto a biological phenomenon. It denies LGBT folks agency and one-dimensionalizes and dehumanizes them. Little attention is paid to actual people, most of whom don’t want to exist as caricatures or physical manifestations of ideology.

Look at the Mattachine Society and the GLF, if in search of evidence. Hays quit his organization when the membership grew concerned over his communist affiliations. Disconcerted by the GLF’s commitment to radicalism, the Gay Activists Alliance splintered from the main group in late 1969, prefiguring a shift toward the current pattern. Rather than care about abstractions like indivisible freedom or sexual liberation, most LGBT Americans simply desired—and desire—equal treatment.

Today’s assimilationist movement nonetheless owes a debt of gratitude to Hays and the GLF. Just as communist organizers spurred the anti-lynching campaigns that would morph into the Civil Rights Movement, radical queers and gay liberationists made the world safe for homosexuals through their unwillingness to remain invisible. Naturally, they defined and imposed a collective identity. While that identity must be questioned, the march toward victory—whatever it looks like—wouldn’t have been a stroll without them.

Daniel Solomon ’16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Pforzheimer House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays. Follow him on Twitter @danieljsolomon.