Happy Women's History Month

March 1, 2012 marks the beginning of Women's History Month, and just as I believe on a daily basis if we are talking about and exploring and writing history, thinking about our society and how it functions and might improve, we cannot but focus on the history and contributions of women, without whom none of us would be here, and without whom this world would fall apart immediately.  In my LGBTQ class, one of the first documents we looked at was "The Woman Identified Woman," by RADICALESBIANS, formerly the Gay Lavender Menace, one of several groups that splintered off from the Gay Liberation Front.

Released on May Day (May 1), 1970 (and eschewing the parodic tone of Valerie Solanas's 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto while sacrificing none of that or similar documents' political acuity) and distributed to attendees of the National Organization for Women-sponsored Second Annual Conference to Unite Women, and then published in Come Out!'s 4th issue, it is very much an artifact of its time and moment, down to its rhetoric, but like similar documents it set the stage for countless theoretical, biopolitical and political, cultural and aesthetic interventions to follow. As it did for me when I first came across it, the text resounded for many of my students, across genders, and become of the documents that they circled back to in our in-class discussions and in their response papers. Its insights are ones, however, that I think still don't pervade the public consciousness, despite the many decades of LGBT and later queer (and queered, and as E. Patrick Johnson and others coined, "quare") studies.

Here, in tribute, are two quotes, the opening paragraph, and the closing.

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society – perhaps then, but certainly later – cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society–the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyze what the rest of her society more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her “straight” (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society’s view of her – in which case she cannot accept herself – and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a tortuous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women – because we are all women.

And:

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that through struggling, an incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.

Copyright © RADICALESBIANS, 1970, 2011, from the Queer Rhetoric Project. All rights reserved.

Remembering a Hero: John G. Lawrence

Garner & Lawrence

One of two key figures in a momentous case that is still too little discussed passed on November 20, 2011, to no public notice: John Geddes Lawrence.

Who?

The Lawrence of Lawrence v. Texas, the legal case that went to the US Supreme Court, which in 2003 ruled, in a momentous 6-3 decision written by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, in Lawrence's and co-plaintiff Tyrone Garner's favor, consequently striking down Texas's anti-sodomy laws, as well as the thirteen others still in force across the United States, thus decriminalizing all private same-sexual activity between consenting adults. This ruling invalidated the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had found, by a 5-4 ruling, that there was no constitutional right to private sexual behavior.  John Lawrence's and Tyrone Garner's (1967-2006) are thus two names that all Americans--for sodomy, so defined, between opposite-sex consenting adult couples, was also criminalized in a number of states--but especially all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people should know, by heart.

How did this case begin? In 1998, outside Houston, a neighbor named Robert Eubanks (who was seeing Garner at the time and who had allegedly been harassing the couple) called the police claiming to have heard violence occurring in Lawrence's apartment. The police entered the apartment and found Lawrence and Garner having sex. Although they could have left the two men alone, they arrested Lawrence and Garner, and held them overnight in jail, charging them with violating Texas's anti-sodomy statute, the Texas Penal Code's Chapter 21, Section 21.06, designated as a Class C misdemeanor anal or oral sex with a person of the same sex.

Both Lawrence and Garner pleaded no contest to the charges and were convicted, thereupon asking for their right to a new trial before a Texas Criminal Court, making the argument that the charges should be dismissed based on the equal protection grounds of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The Criminal Court rejected this request, pleaded no contest and reserved their right to appeal, which they took up, leading them eventually to the US Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case in December 2002.

And we know the outcome. Five judges voted to strike down the Texas law, averring that it violated the due process guarantees, while Sandra Day O'Connor, in a concurring opinion, found that it violated the equal protection guarantees Lawrence and Garner had cited to the Texas Criminal Court. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by justices David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Stephen Breyer. Voting against the law were Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia, who, writing the main dissent, predicted that state laws against same-sex marriage, among other issues, could be struck down as well.  And we know....

Lawrence, who died in Houston, is survived by his partner, Jose Garcia.

LGBTQ Pride/Stonewall at 40: 1969-2009

It seems like only yesterday that the Stonewall Riot's 30th anniversary (1999) was here, and friends and I were heartened by the growing number of states providing civil rights and protections for LGBTQ people, the advances in HIV/AIDS treatment and the prevention partnerships with the federal and state governments, the increasing public presence of LGBTQ people and communities, those of LGBTQ people of color, and a waning to some of the worst aspects of the culture wars. Just a few years before, in 1996, the Supreme Court had overturned Romer v. Evans, thus repealing an ordinance banning LGBTQ rights in Colorado. Where there had been only a few Gay Pride celebrations, primarily in major cities, there were Pride celebrations all over the US, including borough celebrations and Prides geared specifically to and for people of color.

Now, 10 years later, we're 40 years out from Stonewall, many of the things we mulled over, that C and I and others have discussed for so long, have continued apace. In 2003, the Supreme Court, in its Lawrence v. Texas ruling, struck down all laws criminalizing same sexual activity, dealing a death blow to what underpinned a wide array of anti-gay laws across the country. In addition to civil protections at the state level, 6 states--Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont--will now permit same-sex marriage, New York and the District of Columbia will or aim to recognize same-sex marriages conducted in other states, while a few others including New Jersey, have civil unions. HIV/AIDS treatments have improved to the point that most PWAs can live full and active lives. Today not only have a wide array of people have elected to live openly as LGBTQs, but now people come out at even younger ages and are constantly reshaping what it means to be an out LGBTQ person. Many same-sex and transgender couples are raising children all over the country, and gay families can be found in every part of the United States. Alongside this, key elements and aspects of LGBTQ life have not only entered but are reshaping the public discourse. There are even a 24-hour LGBTQ cable TV channel, Logo, and countless online venues by and about LGBTQ people, and while gay stereotypes persist, they are now counterbalanced, to a great degree, by realistic depictions of LGBTQ people, in all our diversity, in the media. In fact, in 2009, many of the right-wing's anti-gay bludgeons have been blunted; ideas drawn from the pioneering erait's nothing to find LGBTQ courses even at the smallest colleges and universities, and the gay-marriage scare no longer holds the sway it did, despite the success of Prop 8. LGBTQ movements are now global; while Western LGBTQ discourses and ways of living have spread across the globe, distinctive local approaches to equality for LGBTQ people and attempts to end homophobic and transphobic discrimination have also arisen, often in conversation with what has come from outside.


Exhibition sign, "1969: The Year of Gay Liberation," at the New York Public Library Schwartzman Research Branch, NYC

Yet many challenges remain. At the federal level with regard to civil and equal rights, we could from some perspectives still be in 1969. Despite the election of a new-generation Democratic president, Barack Obama, who received overwhelming support from LGBTQ people, we not only have STILL the abomination known the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed by our last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, as federal law, but the Obama administration recently defended it with a vigor and viciousness (comparing LGBTQs to pedophiles and incest participants) that would have made even Ronald Reagan blanch. We still have the dreadful, failed Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) policy, enacted by Clinton, on the books, and while Obama pens mash notes to military personnel whose lives and careers continue to be destroyed by DADT, he refuses to take executive action or use his bully pulpit to repeal it. A number of states still do not have comprehensive civil protections for LGBTQ people, meaning that you can still be denied a job or fired, prevented from renting an apartment, or even lose your children, if you are thought to be gay. In 2009. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), still has yet to be passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress, and Obama, when that happens, has said he will sign it. (Who knows either way?) At the federal level, we still get a lot of window-dressing and scraps, and are expected not to ask for much and be glad for the little we get. No thanks!

(A national march for full equal rights for LGBTQ people is being planned for October 11, 2009, in DC. Will you participate?)

In addition, HIV/AIDS, while now even more manageable than in 1999, continue to disproportionately impact LGBTQs of color, especially black men, and effective prevention efforts have reached a roadblock in the US. Many high-profile LGBTQs have come out, including some very noteworthy people of color, yet a great many continue to remain in the closet and a discourse in defense of the closet or invisibility, as a new form of identity/identification, has now arisen in backlash to outness and public visibility. As I wrote some months ago, verbal and physical attacks on LGBTQ youth, and people in general, have risen in the last few years, and although we have federal hate crime legislation, the problem of bullying of gay youth and police indifference to LGBTQ attacks continues. The emphasis on marriage equality has to some degree overshadowed the broader issue of full, equal civil rights and protections.

One issue that perhaps is of less concern to some but always strikes me is the fragmentation and atomization of LGBTQs that has occurred with our mainstreaming; alongside this I would identify the privatization and corporatization of LGBTQ life, an aspect of the creeping neoliberalization of this society that has been underway for decades. In addition, the mainstream LGBTQ leadership and many major LGBTQ organizations remain too white and too focused on upper-middle-class concerns.

I mourn the loss of gay bookstores, gay bars, gay and lesbian and trans and queer institutions; part of this is nostalgia, but part of this is also a recognition that as far as we've gotten, we still need some of these institutions, perhaps more than we realize. To give just one example, once upon a time I knew I could find the poetry books of queer colleagues at A Different Light (where I first met poet Emanuel Xavier), at Private Visions (where acclaimed artist Glenn Ligon discovered a cache of photographs that served as the basis for several art projects), at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop (where I never met with particularly friendly service, but more than once found books I was seeking. Just last week, I went to five different bookstores in New York City, and not a single one had any the books of a handful of queer poets I know; I felt like I did back in the late 1980s, when I would go to the huge Waterstone's on Newbury Street and press them to order books by LGBTQ writers that I knew were on the bookshelf just around the corner at the Glad Day Bookshop on Boylston, where I worked, just so that they'd be more widely available. This is only one example, but I would ask how far Hollywood has come, for example, and whether we can't see the necessity of queer film festivals, queer-themed and focused theaters, LGBTQ-friendly schools, hospitals, and so on. I'm not arguing for segregation or separation, but wondering what we lose when we surrender what we've created and fail to be vigilant.

Finally I would ask, in echo of the gay men and women I came to know when I first came out, in the mid-1980s, people who were forgers and products of the Gay Liberation ethos born out of Stonewall, we enter and become part of the mainstream, but at what cost? What ultimately do we achieve and how does this affect the communities that we've built and developed? Is there a place for those achievements along the way, or do they enter either the museum or the halls of oblivion?


Protestor at Weinstein Hall demonstration for the rights of gay people on the NYU campus, 1970 (Photograph by Diana Davies, Diana Davies Papers), NY Public Library Schwartzman Research Branch, "1969: The Year of Gay Liberation" exhibit

But things will continue to improve, I'm sure. It's amazing to think that the surviving original participants in the Stonewall Riots, and LGBTQ people of their generation, are in their 60s and 70s, while a new generation of LGBTQ people emerges into a very different world made possible, to a tremendous degree, by the events that proceeded and occurred during the Stonewall era, the subsequent push for gay liberation and equality, and the battles in the 1980s to defeat the HIV/AIDS pandemic and extend the gains of the 1970s. For those of us in our 40s and early 50s who have survived the terrible years of the pandemic (and I've written on here before about how it seemed, at a certain point during the late 1980s and early 1990s, that half the gay men I knew from those years were wiped out), today's changes may be striking--gay marriage in Iowa before New York!--and yet at the same time feel inevitable; society was already changing despite the several waves of right-wing backlashes that we witnessed under Reagan-Bush I and Bush II. Where we are now is to a result of the hard and sustained work of liberation and equality, not just for LGBTQ people, but for black people, women, the poor, and all people in the society, that began long before but took concrete, revolutionary form among LGBTQs at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969.

Many changes remain, but we are a lot further along that we were in 1969, when I was 4, or 1979, when I was a teenager, or 1989, shortly after I'd graduated from college. I'm looking forward to seeing where we're going to be 5 and 10 years down the road!

Gay Liberation exhibit poster, NYPL