The Intersection of Culture and Public Memory: Tracking the Changes in
the Stonewall Narrative, 1969-2019
Sarah Taylor
University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities
MA Thesis: American Studies (History) Student Number: 12258938
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction 3
Chapter 2. The Challenge against Stonewall 11
Chapter 3. Diversification and Visibility 26
Chapter 4. Contestations in the Stonewall Myth 42
Chapter 5. Conclusion 57
Chapter 1: Introduction
The Stonewall riots, which took place on June 28th 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in New
York, represent a key moment in LGBT liberation history. The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar, frequented by white, black and Latino/a people, lesbians and gay men, drag queens, transgender people and prostitutes. After a routine police raid at the Stonewall Inn on June 28th, the crowd retaliated, throwing bricks, beer cans and bottles. This has often been viewed as the watershed moment in American lesbian and gay activism, directly leading to the formation of significant LGBT groups, such as the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance. Memorialised as “the hairpin drop heard round the world,” the Stonewall riots have become a symbol of gay and lesbian activism and resilience, celebrated and commemorated internationally.1 The riots have also become immortalised in public spaces, such as
exhibitions, and have seen a number of cultural representations, such as films and documentaries.
This thesis explores the representations of the riots, and interrogates the different shifts in the narrative they present of the Stonewall legacy. As 2019 marks 50th anniversary of
the Stonewall riots, it is an opportune moment to look at the trajectory of discourses surrounding the event. My analysis focuses on fictionalised films, documentaries and exhibitions relating to Stonewall as well as the academic scholarship about the riots. This thesis interrogates the problems that arise within historical interpretations and public memory, and questions how far historical narratives and cultural productions are in sync or against the times. I also interrogate the various tensions within the LGBT movement, and how these tensions are portrayed in the Stonewall representations. I explore the formation of public histories and memories, and show how and why the representation of the riots changed in the longer narrative. Moreover, I examine the role of culture in relation to historical remembering, and explore how far culture has a duty to represent the truth. I argue that there are three major shifts in the Stonewall narrative: a challenge to importance of Stonewall; an increased diversification and visibility of the riot; and a contestation over the origins. I also argue that the mythic status and symbolism of the riots have become more important to the narrative than the actual events themselves. However, whilst the representations generally became more inclusive and progressive in telling the story, certain aspects of the event remain marginalised. As I show, lesbian invisibility and exclusion is a consistent theme throughout the shifting representations.
1 From the New York Mattachine Society newsletter following the riots, as recorded in Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, eds., The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (Sussex: Blackwell, 2015), 25.
In the immediate aftermath the Stonewall riots were initially linked to a feeling of pride, celebration and commemoration within the LGBT community. In this discourse, the riots are seen as the direct catalyst for the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement. On June 28th 1970, one year after, a large-scale parade was held in New York to commemorate
the riots. This event made national headlines, with The New York Times reporting that
“thousands of young men and women homosexuals marched…proclaiming the ‘new strength and pride of the gay people.’”2 During this march, gay activists and allies carried rainbow
banners and walked through the streets chanting “Say it loud, gay is proud.”3 These features
became a tradition in the subsequent Pride marches. Pride has now developed into an annual celebration of the LGBT community, and as of 2016, over six million people attended Pride marches in over 116 U.S. cities.4 Pride is held across the globe in Europe, South America,
Australia and Asia, among other locations. In 2018, Pride was even celebrated in Antarctica for the first time, which saw both people and penguins taking part.5
Whilst estimates of the initial crowd in 1970 varied significantly from 1000 to 20,000 attendees, it is clear that the first march was an important event in the public memory of Stonewall. Come Out!, a periodical produced by the Gay Liberation Front directly after the riots, stated how the marches were in remembrance of “the Stonewall and the Street
Queens.”6 This sense of pride, commemoration and celebration has continued. As 2019 is the
50th Anniversary of the riots, New York is planning on holding the largest event to date.
According to the official website, ‘Stonewall 50’ will mark “the 50th Anniversary of the
Stonewall Uprising and a half-century of LGBTQIA+ Liberation,” with estimates of over 3 million attendees.7 By linking Pride to this liberation, it is clear that the Stonewall Riots are
still perceived as the origin of the modern gay liberation movement.
In Lillian Faderman’s recent work, The Gay Revolution: The Story of A Struggle (2015), there is much emphasis on the Stonewall riots. An entire chapter is focused entirely on the specific events of the night (the header is evocatively titled ‘Earthquake’) and she 2 Lacey Fosburgh, “Thousands of Homosexuals Hold a Protest Rally in Central Park,” New York Times, June 29, 1970. Accessed April 20, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/06/29/archives/thousands-of-homosexuals-hold-a-protest-rally-in-central-park.html.
3 Ibid.
4 Katherine McFarland Bruce, Pride Parades: How a Parade Changed the World (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 5.
5 Jess Glass, “Antarctica is about to have its first ever Pride,” Pink News, May 28, 2018. Accessed June 01, 2019. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/05/28/antarctica-is-about-to-have-its-first-ever-pride/.
6 Bob Kohler, “A Parade in Town,” Come Out! July, 1970, 9. Accessed April 20, 2019. http://outhistory.org/files/original/f6d46c5d90761e3a66edcd4fe32a6785.pdf.
7 WorldPride: Stonewall 50, “One Celebration,” Accessed March 31, 2019. https://2019-worldpride-stonewall50.nycpride.org.
describes the riots as the “spark that would light the fire”.8 Such a view is not unique. The
riots are synonymous with a new type of LGBT activism: one of direct action and pride. Outside of an academic context, this view is still generally held. The popular US TV reality-competition show, Ru Paul’s Drag Race, often refers to the Stonewall riots as the catalyst for a new type of drag and gay activism. In an episode entitled ‘Float Your Boat,’ American drag queen and host Ru Paul describes how “it was a drag queen” who “[dug] her heels in and [started] a revolution” at the Stonewall riots.9 Not only does this further evidence the idea of
the riots as providing a starting point of a new type of activism, but it also links to a debated part of the Stonewall legacy over the true origins of the riots. This contested legacy has become known as the Stonewall Myth, a debate between historians and LGBT activists over who threw the first brick and ignited the riots. This debate remains throughout the Stonewall narrative, with representations marginalising certain figures and groups. This thesis thus explores these contestations and their impact on the Stonewall legacy.
In terms of scholarly work, this thesis draws on research on cultural representation and public memory. Public memory forms an important part of history, and the omission of certain aspects or events can have long-lasting effects. Academic literature on public memory and cultural representations is not sparse, yet work specifically focusing on LGBT memory is understudied in comparison.10 The emergence of LGBT issues, or Queer Studies in academic
and historical research is relatively new, and thus work on specific issues within this field, memory, for example, is still growing. There is much written on how general (non-LGBT specific) public history and memory can be altered by contemporary political and social events. For example, when describing the opening of America’s Civil War Centennial in 1961, Kevin Allen states how “the construction of Historical Memory and Identity is… complicated by the presence of the social and political context in which any public
commemoration is presented.”11 Thus, it is clear that whilst tracking the changing narrative of
the Stonewall riots in cultural representations and public memory, contextualisation is key.
8 Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 208.
9 Ru Paul’s Drag Race. “Float Your Boat.” Season 4, Episode 6. Directed by Nick Murray. Logo TV, March 5, 2012.
10 For a historiographical overview of memory and history, see: Patrick Hunter, “Recent Scholarship on Memory and History,” The History Teacher 33, no. 4 (August 2000): 533-548. For scholarship on the creation of public memory of specific events, see also: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
11
Kevin Allen, “The Second Battle of Fort Sumter: The Debate over the Politics of Race and Historical Memory at the Opening of America's Civil War Centennial, 1961,” The Public Historian 33, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 94.There has been some recent work on role of public memory in LGBT histories, largely related to histories of AIDS. Alexandra Juhasz’s important “Forgetting ACT UP” is a key text here on the role of “professional rememberers.”12 She argues that certain elements of
AIDS history, for example, “street-based, postmodern, confrontational…activism” are commonly remembered over “the rag-tag group of feminists, lesbians, drug addicts [and] people of colour.”13 This refers to why certain events or people are commemorated over
others. Sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage explore this specifically in relation to the Stonewall riots. They argue that whilst there had been other gay activist riots both before and after Stonewall, the Stonewall riots had the “mnemonic capacity” to make it commemorative.14 Armstrong and Crage, whilst writing extensively on how the Stonewall
memory has manifested in Pride marches, do not extend this analysis to cultural
representations, such as fictional films and documentaries. This thesis will contribute to this academic scholarship by examining cinematic representations alongside public memory sites and events.
Susan Ferentinos’ 2016 Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites is a recent addition into the historiography of LGBT public representation. This work acts as an overview of LGBT history in America, as well as an exploration into public sites displaying LGBT histories, such as museums and exhibitions. Whilst I will not be focusing exclusively on exhibitions and public sites in this thesis, Interpreting LGBT History remains a useful introduction into the field. Ferentinos’ arguments on both the importance of representing LGBT histories (reasons she gives, for example, are that it can “foster public dialogue, enrich the full telling of US history…and provide a sense of belonging”), but also on the problems that can arise, are particularly relevant.15 Feretinos’ arguments will provide the theoretical
framework when analysing commemorative exhibitions of the Stonewall riots.
Alongside physical commemorations, I analyse how historical archives have been recently digitalised. For this, I use Cheryl Bolick’s work on how digitalisation promotes a democratisation of historical research.16 Digitisation can also give voices to marginalised
groups of the past and we can see this in the digital collections relating to the Stonewall 12 Alexandra Juhasz, “Forgetting ACT UP,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no.1 (February 2012): 73.
13 Juhasz, “Forgetting ACT UP,” 72.
14 Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,”
American Sociological Review 71 (October 2006): 725.
15 Susan Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 15.
16 Cheryl Mason Bolick, “Digital Archives: Democratizing the Doing of History,” International Journal of
Riots. Thus, the recent work on digitalisation and diversity will proves useful for this thesis in the analysis of online collections.17
I also use academic scholarship relating to cinema and the representation of history in fictional films. Jerome De Groot is a key scholar on cinematic historical interpretations and much of his work examines how far films and television can be used as sources of historical truth. De Groot stresses that historical nostalgia can affect the truth-telling aspect. This is most pertinent in his research on Mad Men, the popular US TV Show, in which de Groot argues that nostalgia overshadows the overt sexism, racism and homophobia of the 1960s.18
Fictional representations of history are often plagued with historical inaccuracies, and
directors and writers use their poetic license to change the true events. Yet it is also important to understand that fictional productions are first and foremost pieces of entertainment, not historical retellings, which are considered for their “cultural valency …rather than [their] content.”19
Similarly to historiography on public memory, literature on cinema mainly concerns non-LGBT specific issues. There are, however, broad overviews and edited collections on LGBT films, such as Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (2004) and Out at the Movies: A
History of Gay Cinema (2008).20 Although both are useful in providing historical background
to LGBT cinema, these collections are still rather generalised and tend to lack in-depth analyses of specific issues within LGBT films. This thesis thus contributes to literature on LGBT film by paying attention to certain complexities: for example, how lesbians are portrayed in male-dominated gay films.
Given that this thesis explores the representation and public memory of the Stonewall riots over a fifty-year period, there is an abundance of primary material to examine. To narrow the analysis, I decided to focus specifically on historians’ work, cinematic
representations and exhibitions. These works best represent the wider shifts in the narratives that I have tracked through my research. By focusing on a combination of well-reviewed 17 For scholarship on the digitalisation of LGBT and marginalised histories, see also: Tamara de Szegheo Lang, “Democratizing LGBTQ History Online: Digitizing Public History in ‘U.S. Homophile Internationalism,”
Journal of Homosexuality 64, no. 7 (2017): 850-869; Stephanie Green, “Inclusions and Exclusions:
Considerations for a Stopes Digital Collection,” Women’s History Review 26, no. 5 (July 2016): 721-737; Roopika Risam, “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities
Quarterly 9, no. 2 (2015): 1-32.
18 Jerome De Groot, “Perpetually dividing and suturing the past and present’: Mad Men and the illusions of history,” Rethinking History 15, no. 2 (June 2011): 269-285.
19 De Groot, “Perpetually dividing and suturing the past and present’: Mad Men and the illusions of history,” 277.
20 Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, eds., Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004); Steven Paul Davies, Out at the Movies: A History of Gay Cinema (Hertfordshire: Kamera Books, 2008).
academic work alongside popular cultural productions and public memory sites, I interrogate how the Stonewall narrative has been portrayed in both academic and mainstream domains. Furthermore, as I explore the critical reception and reviews around these materials, I show how the Stonewall legacy is manifested in public consciousness and memory.
The thesis takes a chronological approach, and each section revolves around the significant periodic shifts in the Stonewall representations through academic and cultural representations. I have chosen to track the shifting historiography through the works of John D’Emilio, Martin Duberman and David Carter, as they are all well established academics in American gay and lesbian history, and have different and contesting arguments on Stonewall. I explore the content and themes of the historians’ work and use a comparative analysis to situate their places in the wider historiographical debate. Thus, the secondary literature becomes primary material. I examine the wider contexts surrounding the book’s publications, as well as the historians’ own personal backgrounds. In this way, I take an in-depth analytical approach to the content of the work, the historians’ theoretical positions and the critical reception surrounding the accounts.
Furthermore, I chose to explore the representations of the Stonewall narrative through film. In particular, I look at two fictional films portraying the riots, and one documentary. The films compliment each other: their narrative arcs are similar, yet they depict different themes and figures in the riots. When examining the documentary, I focus on the
interviewees involved alongside the production. I take a cultural analysis and comparative approach with the fictional films and focus in-depth on the characters, dialogue, and music. Moreover, I use a media-history approach when exploring the production of the films and documentary, such as the directors’ motivations, and the commercial response.
Although I also explore public historical sites relating to LGBT history, I am unable to visually analyse certain exhibitions, as they no longer run. Rather than exploring the exhibition through an archivist and curative approach, which places importance and meaning on the physical locations of the artefacts, I instead use the contemporary reviews and
responses to inform my primary analysis. Given the accessible nature of the digitalised exhibitions, I am able to analyse the artefacts themselves, as they are all online.
After the introduction, the second chapter explores the challenging of the Stonewall legacy in the 1980s, and makes use of John D’Emilio’s pivotal work Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities (1983), the documentary Before Stonewall (1984) and its reception. This
chapter signals a divergence away from the initial celebration of the riots and evidences a longer history of gay and lesbian liberation activism.
Chapter three is on the diversification and growing visibility and shows a different trajectory in the Stonewall narrative: one of increased awareness of the roles of people of colour and drag queens in the riots. The primary research for this chapter is based on Martin Duberman’s historical account Stonewall (1993), the 1994 New York Public Library
exhibition ‘Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall’ and the subsequent 1995 historical film Stonewall based on Duberman’s book.
In chapter four, I explore the development in the Stonewall Myth, the contested triggers of the riots, by looking at David Carter’s historical account Stonewall: The Riots
That Sparked the Gay Revolution (2003) which challenged Duberman’s original claims over
who was present at the riots. I also use the fictional film Stonewall (2015), which is a signal of the contested history given the film represented the riots as a white saviour coming-of-age narrative.
In the conclusion, I examine the general pattern in the shifts of the Stonewall narrative I have shown through my previous chapters. I conclude that whilst generally the trajectory follows a progressive and inclusive approach, lesbian invisibility remains a significant aspect of the Stonewall representations. I also consider how the digitalisation of archives and sources has had an impact on the most recent Stonewall representations. I use the online and interactive monument Stonewall Forever for this analysis. Moreover, I show that despite the contested and mythic status of the riots in public memory, Stonewall remains an undeniably crucial symbol of gay and lesbian liberation.
In her work, Ferentinos draws attention to the way “LGBT interpretation…can change over time.”21 This view relates to a much wider debate concerning language and identity. One
must be careful when using specific language to describe people of the past and this is particularly manifested in the history of sexuality.22 Terms which were used in the 1960s to
describe sexual orientations do not necessarily correlate to today’s meanings, and vice versa. For example, the term “transgender” is a relatively recent addition into the LGBT lexicon.23
Furthermore, certain terms, such as homosexual or gay, have historically male connotations, thus downplaying the lesbian experience. Language is an important part of identification, and I aim to employ the most inclusive and unifying terms throughout the thesis.
21 Ferentinos, Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites, 113.
22 British historian Jeffrey Weeks, for example, argues in his pivotal Coming Out for an existence of homosexual living before it became a named identity in Britain. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual
Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth-Century to the Present (London: Quartert Books, 1977). For more on the
creation of sexuality, see also: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
In order to provide a well-balanced and inclusive analysis, I use the acronym LGBT when discussing the broad range of non-heterosexual identities and the terms lesbian and gay when exploring specific gender differences. When analysing the primary material,
specifically the academic scholarship and the personal testimonies, I refer to the same terms as the author or the individual in question.
Furthermore, as this thesis explores the racialised dimension to the Stonewall legacy, I have chosen to use the term people of colour when referring to anyone of any race that is not white. This term is more inclusive than the term non-white, which suggests that people of colour are against the norm and are somewhat lacking.
Chapter 2: The Challenge against Stonewall
After the initial commemoration and celebration of the Stonewall riots as the
watershed of the gay liberation movement in America, the representation shifted in the 1980s. Both in academia and popular culture, there was a challenge to the view that the riots marked the start of gay activism. Instead, the shifting narrative downplayed the significance of
Stonewall and placed it in a longer narrative of LGBT history. Historians of sexuality, including John D’Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks and Jonathon Ned Katz, began to research and uncover a vibrant LGBT identity and culture existing before 1969. This was mirrored in certain cultural representations, which explored lesbian and gay identities prior to the riots. Whilst the commemorations of the riots did not end – the annual Pride March continued to grow in size and popularity – these representations began to show different dimensions of lesbian and gay identities. This chapter explores this changing representation by focusing specifically on John D’Emilio’s scholarly work, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, the documentary Before Stonewall, and the accompanying reviews and contemporary
responses.24
The periodisation of this chapter, and the first shift in the Stonewall legacy, focuses primarily on the years between 1983 and 1993. At the time of its publication, Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities represented an “intelligent…and welcome addition to [the]
understanding of minority history,” and so 1983 provides a relevant starting point.25 Before
Stonewall was released a year later in 1984 and is a critically acclaimed, awarded and
well-reviewed documentary. The release of Martin Duberman’s historical work in 1993 signalled a change in the trajectory of the Stonewall legacy and the diversification and visibility of marginalised identities, which I explore in chapter 3.
During the ten years I focus on here, there were significant developments and changes in attitudes towards LGBT people. In the 1980s, lesbian and gay urban expansion and
political mobilisation grew, alongside certain legal protections.26 In 1982, for example,
Wisconsin became the first U.S. state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, education and employment.27 With the growing heterosexual acceptance of LGBT
communities, the “pink dollar” made a significant impact on American economy, particularly in the housing market and gentrification of neighbourhoods.28 Furthermore, Steve Endean
24 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Before Stonewall, directed by Greta Schiller
(USA: First Run Features, 1984).
25 Peter G. Filene, “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Book Review),” The Journal of American History 70, no. 3 (December 1983): 746.
26 Marc Stein, Rethinking the Lesbian and Gay Movement (New York: Routledge, 2012), 117.
27 Anthony P. Natale, Kirsten Havig, Megan Gandy-Guedes and David. A. McLeod, “The Intersection of Policy and Practice: Advancing Civil Rights Equality and Equity,” in Social Work Practice with the LGBTQ
Community: The Intersection of History, Health, Mental Health and Policy Factors, ed. Michael P. Dentato
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 385.
28 Dennis Altman, “Globalization and the International Gay/Lesbian Movement,” in Handbook of Lesbian and
Gay Studies, eds., Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2002), 417. For
scholarship on the negative consequence of LGBT gentrification and the rise of mainstream consumerism during and post the AIDS crisis, see: Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost
founded the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a LGBT advocacy group and not-for-profit organisation, in 1980. The HRC was created to give financial aid to political candidates who supported LGBT rights, and went on to advocate and lobby for LGBT issues, such as
marriage equality.29
Yet concurrently, this decade also saw a growth of New Right conservative and evangelical anti-gay agenda with Roland Reagan’s presidency in 1981 and the prolific rise of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Thus, this was a contentious time in terms of gay activism. The earlier enthusiasm, pride and visibility of gay activism post-Stonewall now became a target for anti-LGBT activists, who wrongly explained the growing AIDS epidemic to LGBT sexual attitudes.
Furthermore, queer theorists and scholars of sexuality began to interrogate the whole notion of homosexuality. This background scholarly debate – whether homosexuality could be explained as biological essentialism or social constructivism – is important in this narrative, particularly in the background of D’Emilio’s study.
John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities is important not only because it downplayed the role of the Stonewall riots, but also because it represented the beginning of a long narrative approach in American LGBT history. Other than important works by Jonathan Katz, by the time Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities was published most other accounts of homosexuality focused only on European histories.30 For example, Jeffrey Weeks’ Coming
Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth-Century to the Present (1977) and
John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980) specifically
explored British and Western European homosexual communities.31 By the end of the decade,
the scholarly circle of homosexual studies had widened, but Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities represents one of the first academic books to focus on homosexual experiences
in America.32
Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
29 Human Rights Campaign, “HRC Story,” Accessed June 20, 2019. https://www.hrc.org/hrc-story.
30 Walter L. Williams, “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970,” The American Historical Review 88, no. 5, (Dec 1983): 1341. Prior to D’Emilio’s work, the only historical account focusing on American homosexuality was: Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American
History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA; A Documentary History (New York: Crowell, 1976).
31 For books on European gay history, see: Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: homosexual Politics in Britain from
the Nineteenth-Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982).
32 For books on American LGBT history following D’Emilio, see: Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, eds., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: New American Library, 1989); Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Margaret Cruikshank, The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (New York: Routledge, 1992);
Like Kate Millett’s pivotal feminist account of heterosexual relations, Sexual Politics published in 1970, John D’Emilio’s study was a concise and informative history of
homosexual identities and communities in America from 1945 until 1970.33 D’Emilio
chronicled the emergence of an urban gay culture at the end of World War II to the
beginnings of gay rights activism in the Mattachine Society and the homophile movement in the 1950s. It may seem odd at first that a book, which is credited as a “milestone in the history of the American gay movement,” featured little analysis of Stonewall – itself an event also described as a milestone in gay history.34 Although D’Emilio’s analysis began with a
description of the riots, his main argument was clear and unambiguous: that, at the time of the riots in 1969, “homosexuality had already ceased being an invisible phenomenon.”35 Such an
analysis was not controversial in academic circles, in fact, few of the initial peer reviews of the book in 1983 and 1984 commented on this argument. Instead, D’Emilio’s work was largely accepted and acclaimed by critics and academics, who praised the author for detailing this specific history “for the first time.”36 Furthermore, perhaps ironically given the award
title, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities was given the ‘Stonewall Book Award’ in 1984 – a literary award recognising works with “exceptional merit” relating to the LGBT experience.37
It is evident that D’Emilio’s arguments represented a breakaway from the initial narrative in the Stonewall legacy. Perhaps this was easier to accept because he framed the shift as an emphasis and uncovering of an earlier vibrant gay history, rather than a discrediting of the role of the riots.
D’Emilio also acted as one of the historical consultants to the documentary Before
Stonewall, released the following year in 1984, and thus the documentary mirrored much of
his academic analysis. Before Stonewall, directed by Greta Schiller and narrated by novelist Rita Mae Brown, both American lesbian campaigners for LGBT rights, was a documentary based on archival images and interviews with many prominent gay and lesbian figures. Similarly to Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, Before Stonewall built a chronological
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
33 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
34 University of Chicago Press Books, “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities” Accessed April 9, 2019. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3640270.html
35 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 249.
36 Leila Rupp, “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Book Review),” Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 714.
37 GLBTRT, “Stonewall Book Awards List,” Accessed April 9, 2019. http://www.ala.org/rt/glbtrt/award/stonewall/honored#1984.
portrait, and “[excavated] the secret history of American gay life” prior to 1969.38 The
documentary explored the 1920s and the “world of the demimondaine,” to World War II, McCarthyism and 1960s Beat culture.39 Before Stonewall quickly became a popular and
critically appraised documentary, premiering in 1984 at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, one of the largest publically attended festivals globally. The film won many major prizes,
including the Emmy Award for Best Historical/Cultural Program in 1987, and today is still recognised as part of the LGBT cinematic canon. Most recently, Before Stonewall was shown at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in celebration of the Teddy Awards for films
with LGBT topics.40
D’Emilio’s work fitted neatly into the contemporary academic debates regarding the origins of homosexuality. In a review of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, published in 1984, Leila Jupp asserts that D’Emilio is an adherent of the social constructionist school of homosexual history. Along with Katz, D’Emilio conceived of “homosexuality as a relatively modern social construct that emerged in the industrialised West” as a result of socioeconomic changes in the nineteenth-century.41 In the 1980s, historians and academics had begun to
debate the nature and categories of “the homosexual” or “the lesbian”. Many theorists, such as Weeks and Foucault, noted the flexible nature of sexuality prior to the nineteenth-century: people partook in homosexual acts without identifying as a homosexual. The nineteenth-century brought rigid and fixed categories regarding sexuality, and the label “homosexual” or “lesbian” (to a lesser degree) “applied not merely to particular sexual acts…but to an entire person whose nature…was sharply distinguishable from the majority of “normal”
heterosexuals.”42 This represented a step towards from a biological essentialist view of
homosexuality.
D’Emilio argued that gay activists had to first come into “existence as a self-conscious, cohesive minority” and that homosexuality was created in opposition to
“systematic injustice.”43 In this respect, sexual categorisation and homophobic discrimination
created an “othered” gay minority. This is important when related to gay activism and the 38 Andrew Pulver, “DVD review: Before Stonewall,” The Guardian, July 2009. Accessed April 9, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jul/03/before-stonewall-dvd-review.
39 Before Stonewall.
40 The Teddy Award is an international film award given for films with LGBT topics, presented and judged as part of the Berlin International Film Festival. The Award started in 1987 and as of 2019 is still ongoing. For more information, see: http://www.teddyaward.tv/en/.
41 Rupp, “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Book Review),” 712.
42 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 4.
Stonewall riots. It suggested that the riots were not a systematic and fixed agenda of gay liberation, instead it was as a result of a long historical oppression. D’Emilio situated this oppression and subsequent LGBT organisation before the Stonewall riots, evidencing a longer history of LGBT emancipation. Thus, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities positioned
Stonewall in the longer narrative of self-awareness, identity building and activism, rather than the birth of the movement.
The actual analysis of the riots in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities is fairly brief, and is subsumed into a larger narrative of social activism. When glancing through the index, “Stonewall riot,” only appears on 3 pages. Nestled in the penultimate chapter, ‘A New Beginning,’ D’Emilio gave a brief overview of the events. The description is so brief, in fact, that there is no mention of specific named patrons at the Stonewall Inn on the night of the riots. Instead, D’Emilio ambiguously referred to the actions and anger of “three drag queens,” “a lesbian” and “Puerto Rican transvestites,” which then “channelled into intense discussion of what many had begun to memorialise as the first gay riot in history.”44 By providing only a
short descriptive analysis of the events, but then subsequently following with a discussion into counterculture and the New Left, D’Emilio framed the riots into a wider history of social activism. This is further evidenced in his ‘Conclusion,’ in which D’Emilio asserted that “whether as New Left activists or as counterculture enthusiasts, [young gay radicals] had already decided that American society was corrupt and oppressive.”45 In this way, D’Emilio
situated Stonewall as part of a larger social activist history, which also includes feminism, student activism and Black Power.
Longer History of Lesbian and Gay Activism
D’Emilio’s work also showed a longer narrative of LGBT resistance and organisation through examples of riots prior to Stonewall. His analysis thus contributed to the growing field of public memory and history in relation to LGBT activism. Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage, in their essay on the Stonewall Myth, “Movements and Memory,” outline cases of gay riots in America. Their analysis is a useful and concise breakdown of how and why certain events are remembered over others. They argue that, although the Stonewall riots were not the first, they are the most remembered and commemorated due to their “mnemonic capacity”.46 In other words, Stonewall was “the first commemorable event to occur at a time
44 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 232.
45 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 246.
46 Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,”
and place where homosexuals had enough capacity to produce a commemorative vehicle.”47
As Armstrong and Crage show, there are examples of pre-Stonewall gay riots. For example, the police raid and subsequent riot in 1966 at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, an “all-hours coffee shop popular with ‘gay hustlers’, ‘hair fairies’, queens, and street kids.”48
The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot is an relevant example of a vibrant gay and lesbian community pre-Stonewall, and outside of New York. Historian Betty Luther Hillman’s extensive study on gay culture and identity, specifically in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement in the years 1964-1972, further explores the development of this community. Hillman notes how Compton’s Cafeteria riot was “the first ‘gay riot’” to break out, and how years later, “San Francisco gay activists remembered the riot…as ‘the first recorded violence by Gays against the police anywhere.’”49 Hillman also shows a vibrant gay culture through
her discussion of San Francisco drag queen culture and drag balls. In this way, we can use it as a complimentary text to D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, as it further evidences a visible and organised LGBT community and activism, prior to 1969.
As D’Emilio showed, police harassment and crackdowns of gay bars had occurred throughout the 1950s, resulting in thousands of arrests annually.50 Although police
harassment did not necessarily lead to gay riots and resistance, D’Emilio referred to
occasions when this did happen, such as the New Year’s Eve dance in San Francisco in 1964. On the night of dance, organised by Protestant ministers and homophile activists for the gay community, the San Francisco police intervened: demanding entrance, arresting patrons and “flash[ing] pictures of each of the 600 guests.”51 Two days later, the ministers retaliated and
held a press conference. A later criminal trial vindicated the gay population and gained public support.52 The New Year’s Eve raid was seen as a “catalyst” and a mobilisation for the
homosexual community in San Francisco.53 Armstrong and Crage rightly point out that whilst
the New Year’s Eve raid was a highly important event, there was little attempt to commemorate it in public memory, partly due to the homophile movement’s moderate
47 Ibid.
48 Armstrong and Crage, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,” 732.
49 Betty Luther Hillman, ‘“The most profoundly revolutionary act a homosexual can engage in’: Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964-1972,” Journal of the
History of Sexuality 20, no.1 (January 2011): 161. 50 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 49.
51 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 194.
52 Ibid.
approach.54 Nevertheless, the New Year’s Eve raid still serves as an example of a
pre-Stonewall “turning point” in the gay liberation movement.55
In the same way as D’Emilio’s work, and the studies of Hillman, Armstrong and Crage, Before Stonewall showed examples of gay riots occurring prior to Stonewall. For example, the documentary focused on the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles. During the 1950s and 1960s, the police frequently raided the Black Cat Tavern, an LGBT and “bohemian” bar in Los Angeles, over disputes with the owner, Sol Stoumen, and conflicts with the liquor license.56 When the constant police harassment finally reached breaking point in 1966, the gay
group PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defence and Education) organised a response to the raid, with over 500 attendees.57 In Before Stonewall, the former clientele of the Black Cat Tavern
reunite, and discuss the importance of the 1960’s bar culture. The patrons look fondly back over their years there, stating how there was “total human tolerance” and acceptance in these gay and bohemian bars. Another argues that this gay culture and activism “did get going before Stonewall,” again suggesting that the groundwork had been developed pre-1969.58
Similarly to D’Emilio, Before Stonewall also situated the Stonewall riots in the broader history of social activism, such as civil rights and the women’s liberation movement. The narrator, Rita Mae Brown, described how these social movements often intersected and influenced one another, as the “change in the temper and the tempo gay movement, [was] partly as a result of Black Power” and the more militant tactics.59 The Stonewall riots were
explained not solely as a result of increasing gay oppression, but also due to more militant tactics in the 1960s generally. D’Emilio noted how homophile organisations, such as the Mattachine society, an LBGT group founded in 1950 in Los Angeles, were conventional and moderate in their activism. The group generally relied on professional and non-LGBT assistance, and fear of exposure “discouraged individuals from espousing anything that smacked of radicalism.”60 However, the 1960s, with the increased studies of homosexuality
and the rise in LGBT magazines and erotica novels, meant that homosexuality was no longer regarded as taboo. A collective identity was formed. This identity, coupled with the rising militancy of other social activist groups meant that LGBT activism began to take a more
54 Ibid.
55 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 194.
56 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 187.
57 Eve Goldberg, “Riot at the black cat,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 19, no.3 (Summer 2012): 12.
58 Before Stonewall.
59 Before Stonewall.
radical approach.61 By framing the Stonewall riots within a longer narrative of social activism,
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and Before Stonewall thus successfully challenged the
idea of Stonewall as a birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement.
Lesbian (in)visibility
Lesbian separation and invisibility is a significant aspect in both the scholarship of sexuality and also within the LGBT liberation movement itself. Whilst D’Emilio’s work largely focused on a generalised (white and male) gay community, Before Stonewall, perhaps on account of its female-led production team, was a relatively balanced view at both male and female homosexuals. I firstly examine the tensions between feminism and social activist groups, and then explore how these tensions manifest in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities,
Before Stonewall and their representations of the riots.
The relationship between feminism and both leftist social activist groups and radical organisations is contentious, and at times conflicting. Many of these groups, including
counter-culture, student and Black Power movements, ignored gender issues and women were often relegated to secondary and less important roles. For example, in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an American student movement emerging from the New Left of the 1960s, women made up only six percent of the executive committee in 1964.62 This
evidenced the New Left tendency to overlook women’s issues and feminist agendas, and showed that social activist groups were often unable to combine both social and gender equality.63
This occurred also in Black Power groups, such as the Black Panther Party. Michele Wallace and bell hooks, both black American gender theorists and academics, have written extensively on the sexism and male “dominator culture” within Black Power groups.64 High
levels of chauvinism and machismo within Black Power meant that women were more 61 For scholarship on the rising radical and militant activism in the 1960s, see: Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years
of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987); Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds.,“Taking it to the streets”: A Sixties Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and The Politics of Solidarity (California: AK Press, 2006); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2006);
Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies, eds., From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).
62 Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 28.
63 For more on the tension between New Left theories and feminism, see: Ellen Kay Trimberger, “Women in the Old and New Left: The Evolution of a Politics of Personal Life,” Feminist Studies 5, no.3 (August 1979): 432-449; Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & The
New Left (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).
64 bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004), 155; Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: The Dial Press, 1974).
regularly treated “as symbols than as active participants,” and often undertook secondary and stereotypical roles, such as nursing and teaching, rather than leadership positions.65 Women’s
emancipation in Black Power groups was treated as secondary to the wider Black Power aims, such as black pride and self-determination, due to the conflict between Black Nationalism and feminism. The second-wave feminist movement and Betty Freidan’s 1963 The Feminine
Mystique only focused on the experiences of white, middle-class women, and ignored the
intersectional struggles of women of colour.66 Nonetheless, it is still clear that social and
radical activist groups rarely demanded women’s liberation, or adhered to feminist agendas. The different histories of lesbianism and male homosexuality somewhat explain the male domination in LGBT activism and historiography. Sodomy laws were first introduced in Colonial America, and originally they did not discriminate only against homosexual relations, but rather focused on “crimes against nature,” such as masturbation and oral sex.67 This was
largely due to Puritan disapproval of non-reproductive sexual acts. However, by the
seventeenth-century, “sodomy laws were used more often against same-sex coupling,” which often ended in extreme punishments including execution.68 In the nineteenth-century and the
emergence of homosexuality as a named concept and identity (rather than just a sexual experience), and the increased McCarthyist witch-hunts against “sexual perverts” in the mid-twentieth century, arrests and convictions for sodomy rose.69
However, the laws throughout were generally only targeted towards gay men. Due to the patriarchal and traditional view of women as naïve, unsexual and passive beings, same-65 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases (California: University of California Press, 1990), 42.
66 Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). It is also worth noting that Freidan distanced herself away from the gay and lesbian movement, describing lesbianism as a “Lavender Menace” and a threat to the national Organisation of Women (NOW). For literature on the conflict between black feminism and white feminism, see: bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (New York: South End Press, 1981); bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (London: Turnaround, 1992); Kimberly Springer, “Third Wave Black Feminism?” Signs 27, no.4 (Summer 2002): 1059-1082; Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (California: Crossing Press, 2007). For more on the complexities of Black Nationalism and gender politics, see: Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Manning Marable, Race, Reform and
Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1946-1990 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1991). The disproportionate number of sterilisations performed on women of colour and racist family planning policies had a significant impact on black gender roles, evidenced the power over black women’s bodies and further highlighted the differences between the black and white feminist agenda. For literature on this, see: Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Black Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
67 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 13.
68 Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 9. For more, see also: Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995); William N. Eskridge Jr.,
Dishonourable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003 (New York: Viking, 2008).
69 Anthony C. Infanti, Everyday Law for Gays and Lesbians: And Those Who Care About Them (New York: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 11.
sex relations between women were not considered as a threat to society in the same way as male homosexuality. Furthermore, the specifics of the sodomy laws, such as anal sex, did not refer to female same-sex relationships. Lesbianism as a named term did not emerge until the early twentieth-century, with the growth of lesbian literature, and scientific studies into female same-sex relationships.70 Thus, lesbianism has always been perceived differently to
male homosexuality in American society, including within LGBT groups.
Despite the growth of both lesbian and homosexual communities in the mid-twentieth century, “male solipsism” dominated LGBT activism.71 For example, in homophile
movements such as the Mattachine Society, lesbians rarely held leadership positions, and “most of the organisers…were middle-class white men.”72 In the case of the Stonewall riots
there was still a tendency to overshadow the actions undertaken by lesbians. Despite evidence that women frequented the Stonewall Inn, that “a handful of butch lesbians” helped to start the riots, and that Stonewall is remembered in public memory as the “emblem of gay and lesbian power,” female contribution within the riots has regularly been downplayed or all together ignored.73 For example, In Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, D’Emilio described how “an
impromptu chorus line of gay men” gathered and faced police harassment during the riots in 1969, with only one reference to “a lesbian” in the whole section.74
Even in general queer histories and historiography of LGBT movements, there tends to be male domination. The 1992 essay, “Lesbian history and gay studies: keeping a feminist perspective” explores lesbian invisibility and exclusivity in queer studies. Co-written by Rosemary Auchmuty, Shelia Jeffreys and Elaine Miller, the essay gives specific examples of male domination in historical studies of sexuality. In reference to major male historians of sexuality, such as Jeffrey Weeks, the writers argue that “the male experience is likely to be seen…as the norm, with lesbian experience as a deviant or inferior version.”75 Therefore it is
70 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 2. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (New York: Sun Dial Press, 1928) was a groundbreaking piece of lesbian fiction, and increased awareness and discussion of lesbianism in both America and Britain in the 1920s. Furthermore, American Mildred Berryman’s pivotal psychological and scientific study, The Psychological
Phenomena of the Homosexual (1938) explored female same-sex desire and relationships in Salt Lake City in
the mid-1930s.
71 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 92.
72 Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa G. Materson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and
Gender History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 519. 73 Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 195.
74 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 232.
75 Rosemary Auchmuty, Sheila Jeffreys and Elaine Miller, “Lesbian history and gay studies: keeping a feminist perspective,” Women’s History Review 1 no. 1 (1992): 96.
apparent that the LGBT scholarship itself does little to interrogate the nuances and complexities of lesbianism and female same-sex relations.
Before Stonewall, however, provided a balanced retelling of both gay and lesbian
contributions. The environment of the 1980s, when Before Stonewall was produced, explains a focus on lesbian visibility. The rise of Women’s Studies in academia and universities and the formation of significant lesbian groups, such as the Combahee River Collective, active from 1974-1980, indicate a growing awareness of lesbianism in public and academic discourse. Furthermore, lesbian feminism emerged in academic thought in the 1970s as a challenge to patriarchal and sexist tendencies within the mainstream gay liberation movement, and homophobia within second-wave feminism. Key feminist activists such as Sheila Jeffreys, Barbara Smith and Charlotte Bunch advocated separate positions, viewing heterosexuality and patriarchy at the root of all oppressions. This historical context, in combination with the female-led production team, explains the focus of lesbianism in Before Stonewall.
In all the key and pivotal stages of LGBT American history – the 1920s speakeasies and emergence of gay literature, World War II, the Kinsey Report, McCarthyism and beat culture – lesbian experiences are frequently discussed and interwoven in Before Stonewall. For example, the lesbian political rights organisation founded in 1955, the Daughters of Bilitis, is described as offering a “supportive atmosphere for lesbians.” One of the
interviewees, Barbara Gittings, explains her excitement when joining and being in a room with other lesbians for the first time in her life, saying “Oh, what a thrill that was!” 76
Furthermore, The Ladder, the first national lesbian magazine in the United States, is
described as “the only link women had to others like themselves,” noting the importance and need for lesbian-only publications.77 The interviewees themselves represented a wide range of
voices, including important lesbian activists and writers such as Audre Lourde, Ann Bannon and Barbara Gittings. In a review in Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, written ten years after the documentary was released, Jenny Lemon notes the inclusively of lesbian and female perspectives in Before Stonewall. She writes that, whilst female sexuality is often referred to in binary oppositions (such as “Madonna and the whore,”) “transgressive,
experimental and avante garde film directors such as… Greta Schiller” have been able to show different dimensions of female sexuality.78 In this way, Before Stonewall is an example
of a progressive and diverse female-led production. 76 Before Stonewall.
77 Ibid.
However, whilst Before Stonewall represents visible and important lesbian
communities in the lead up to 1969, there is not an equal representation of all sexual identities or races. Before Stonewall largely focuses only on white gender-conforming lesbian and gay people, and does little to explore the contributions of transgender people, drag queens and people of colour in the riots. There are no transgender people interviewed, and most of the interviewees are white. In this way, whilst Before Stonewall succeeds in portraying the actions of women, the racial and drag dimension is lacking.
The impact of AIDS on LGBT activism and scholarship
Whilst the 1980s was a progressive era in terms of feminist and queer studies and discourses, the early years of the decade were also marked by a much more sinister and devastating phenomenon within the LGBT community. In June 1981, the US Centre for Disease Control published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report detailing cases of a rare infection among a group of five men, “all active homosexuals.”79 The disease,
reported as homosexual “cancer” in mainstream outlets, would later be diagnosed as AIDS in 1982.80 The impact of AIDS, the most advanced and serious phase of the HIV, on the LGBT
community cannot be understated.
By the early-1980s, AIDS had spread through the gay community. In 1982, Larry Kramer, an AIDS and LGBT activist, founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York to provide counselling and support for those affected. The diagnosis AIDS had shifted away from the previous term “GRID” (gay-related immune deficiency), evidencing that it was not gay specific. However, the correlation between gay communities and cases of AIDS meant that gay communities in America faced extreme marginalisation and stigmatisation. The “response of the federal government to the epidemic was…slow,” which only served to further ostracise gay communities.81 In fact, it was not until 1985 that President Reagan first
mentioned the term “AIDS,” and only two years later officially referred to it as “public enemy number one.”82 It is thus important to understand both Before Stonewall and Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities against this backdrop in the early 1980s. Although both
79 CDC, “Pneumocystic Pneumonia --- Los Angeles,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 30, no. 21 (June 1981). Accessed April 15, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/june_5.htm.
80 Lawrence K. Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” The New York Times, July 3, 1981. Accessed May 12, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41-homosexuals.html.
81 Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding (Washington: The National Academies Press, 2001). 82 Gerald M. Boyd, “Reagan Urges Abstinence for Young to Avoid AIDS,” The New York Times, April 2, 1987. Accessed May 12, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/02/us/reagan-urges-abstinence-for-young-to-avoid-aids.html
analyses ended before the rise of AIDS in America, their longer approach of gay history can be seen somewhat as a response to the extreme homophobic discrimination of the time.
The Stonewall riots spurred on a generation of proud and visible gay activists in America, and impacted on a new type of gay activism. As opposed to the conservatism of the 1950s homophile movement, which, according to D’Emilio, was an “accommodation to social norms,” the post-Stonewall generation proudly affirmed their identities.83 According to
journalist John-Manuel Androite, in his historical enquiry into the HIV/AIDS epidemic
Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America, this visibility and pride increased
during the AIDS epidemic, despite growing stigmatisation. Androite argues how, “the boldness that homosexuals gained after the 1969 Stonewall uprising meant that neither the shame…nor the stigma…would stop them from speaking out about the medical and political injustices they were experiencing.”84 Androite’s arguments here, that Stonewall represented a
watershed and shift in direction in LGBT activist policies, may initially seem in conflict with the arguments in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and Before Stonewall. Both of these works dismantled this post-Stonewall identity way of thinking, and situated Stonewall in a longer narrative of gay and lesbian activism.
However, Androite’s arguments actually serve to reinforce both D’Emilio’s work, and the documentary. Androite’s assertion that lesbians and gays after Stonewall “deflected homophobic assaults as they pressed on toward the goal of surviving – and ultimately conquering – the scourge” can be read in direct reference to D’Emilio, and Greta Schiller et al. The 1980s, with its homophobia and AIDS-related discrimination, would not have been an easy environment to advocate a vibrant gay culture, especially in popular culture. The very fact that Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and Before Stonewall exist is in credit to a new and proud LGBT identity. Whilst Androite may disagree over the precise importance of the riots, it is clear that D’Emilio and the production team behind Before Stonewall represented the lesbians and gays that Androite is referring to. In his ‘Introduction,’ D’Emilio noted how the pre-Stonewall gay emancipation struggle “deserved more than consignment to the dustbin of history.”85 Taken in context of the 1980s AIDS crisis, this is a proud reaffirmation against
contemporary discrimination. Thus, Before Stonewall and Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities both portrayed proud and thriving gay communities in America, serving not
83 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 81.
84 John-Manuel Androite, Victory Deferred: How AIDS changed gay life in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3.
only to dismantle challenges of shame and discrimination, but also to prove that gay history is embedded into American society.
Furthermore, both give hopeful and promising perspectives on the future. Before
Stonewall ended on the message that despite an ongoing struggle, “we are winning,”86 whilst
D’Emilio concluded that the gay emancipation struggle helped to make the LGBT community “an integral part of the social fabric.”87 This type of unashamed, visible and hopeful discourse
surrounding LGBT identities and AIDS can also been seen in the organisation AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). In 1987 Kramer founded ACT UP, a direct action campaign group, after he became disillusioned and “impatient” with the moderate tactics within the GMHC.88 The similarities between ACT UP politics, Before Stonewall and Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities are twofold. Firstly, all advocated hope and encouragement for the
LGBT community. For example, in a speech given by Vito Russo in 1988, an American LGBT activist, historian and member of ACT UP, he powerfully proclaimed “after we kick the shit out this disease, we’re all going to be alive to kick the shit out of this system,” evidencing ACT UP’s hopeful message.89 Secondly, ACT UP, the documentary and
D’Emilio’s work all visibly and proudly endorsed LGBT identities, despite the negative stigmatisation and association with AIDS. ACT UP particularly showed the need for a public discourse on AIDS, represented by its evocative “Silence=Death” poster and slogan.90
Although ACT UP was not founded until later in the 1980s, it is clear that it represented a continuation of the unashamed and hopeful LGBT discourses that were advocated within
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and Before Stonewall.
Conclusion
86 Before Stonewall.
87 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 238.
88 Larry Kramer, interview with Eric Marcus. Making Gay History: The Podcast. Podcast audio. January 26, 1989. Accessed May 1, 2019. https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/larry-kramer/. For more on Kramer’s disillusionment with the GMHC and conflict between AIDS activism groups, see Kramer’s autobiographical play, The Normal Heart (1985).
89 Vito Russo, “Why We Fight” (Speech, ACT UP Demonstration in Albany New York, May 9, 1988). Accessed May 1, 2019. http://www.actupny.org/documents/whfight.html.
90 Jim Eigo, “The city as body politic/ the body as city unto itself,” in From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban
Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization, eds. Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduck
(New York: Verso, 2002), 181. For more on ACT UP’s emotive and powerful politics, see also: Debroah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and Before Stonewall contributed to the
Stonewall legacy by challenging the significance of the riots on LGBT identities and activism. This represented a shift away from the initial commemoration and celebration of the riots. It is important, I think, to emphasis that both D’Emilio and Before Stonewall were not attacking the riots, nor the contributions made by gay activist groups, such as the Gay Liberation Front, that came afterwards. Instead, they were simply suggesting that modern gay liberation did not start in 1969.
Although both D’Emilio and Before Stonewall downplayed the significance of the riots, they both highlighted an important shift in LGBT activism in the 1960s. Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communitiesparticularly shows the transition from the homophile’s moderate politics in the 1950s to the more radical LGBT activism, influenced by other militant groups such as the Black Panther Party and counter-culture activism. D’Emilio and Before Stonewall showed that this shift in activism did not begin with the Stonewall riots, but had already existed within the wider narrative of 1960s social politics. Perhaps this is why both were so popular and well received, as rather than dismissing the riots, they framed Stonewall within a larger historical movement of social activism.
Whilst both lack diverse representations and inclusivity, Before Stonewall and Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities nonetheless contributed to the Stonewall narrative, especially
considering the rather sparse amount of LGBT American histories in the early 1980s. The diversification and visibility of marginalised identities, especially drag queens and people of colour, did not widely occur until the 1990s. Chapter 3 will explore this shift.
After the challenge mounted in the 1980s to the notion that Stonewall was the birth of the modern gay movement, there was once again a shift in the Stonewall legacy in the 1990s. In both cultural and academic representations, there was a greater diversification and
visibility of marginalised groups and their contributions in the riots. This was a shift away from the earlier representations which both mainly focused on white, male and gender-conforming experiences.91 By exploring the roles and actions of marginalised groups, the
representations in the 1990s expanded the Stonewall legacy by uncovering previously forgotten voices. This chapter explores this changing representation by focusing on Martin Duberman’s book Stonewall, the New York Public Library exhibition ‘Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall’ and the subsequent film based on Duberman’s work, Stonewall, as well as reviews and responses.
This chapter focuses on the years 1993-2004. 1993 is a relevant starting point, as it was the publication year of Stonewall, a part biographical and part historical account of the riots, written by historian and activist Martin Duberman.92 This acclaimed account
re-examined the riots through the testimonies of six individuals and began the general shift into an increased diversification of marginalised voices. The exhibition “Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall” was shown a year later in 1994, and was a well-reviewed public examination into Stonewall history. Nigel Finch’s historical film, Stonewall was based on Duberman’s book and released two years later in 1995.93 The film focused specifically on
experiences of drag queens and people of colour. This second shift ends in 2004, with the publication of David Carter’s academic work Stonewall, which challenged Duberman’s arguments about the origins of the riots.
The 1990s saw an increase in homophobia and stigmatisation as a result the widespread AIDS epidemic. Furthermore, governmental policies, such as the 1994 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell bill (DADT) discriminated against the LGBT community, by barring openly gay, lesbian or bisexual people from military services. Those who were closeted were free to join. Such division and discrimination only served to reinforce feelings of homosexual shame and secrecy, and “confirmed the stigma against which the movement had been fighting for decades,” seemingly a step backwards from the visible “Say it Loud, Gay and Proud”, politics of the 1970s.94
91 I use the term gender-conforming here, rather than cisgender, as I feel it allows for a more inclusive and fluid gender interpretation.
92 Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993).
