wk 8 REPLY
READ ALL readings I have provided.
I will post all required readings. Do not quote or refer to outside resources. Use ONLY the readings I have provided as reference or quotes.
Reply to each post will be 200-400 words long.
What isimportant to include are parenthetical references to page numbers when you’re citing or responding a specific point. This way, our colleagues can easily find and read an intriguing reference that they hadn’t noticed.(include page number ) For example:
I was stunned to learn that the first woman to run for U.S. president was Victoria Woodhull, in 1872. She was a self-proclaimed “Free Lover” and claimed the right to love anyone for any length of time without being regulated by a father, husband, or any law (Bronski, pg 81-81).
QUEERNESS 2
Post 1
I was deeply fascinated by the story of Christine Jorgensen. Christine had been born into a male body but had always felt from a young age that she was supposed to be born into a female body. In her early twenties she realized that she was a heterosexual woman instead of a crossdresser or gay man. After this realization she became interested in learning about sex changes and began taking female hormone treatments. She had a surgery to remove her penis and testicles and reshape her scrotum into a labia. While she was recovering from surgery a trade magazine reported her story and she became “the most talked about girl in the world”. It was interesting to learn about her story and understand that even though she was not the first person to undergo a gender reassignment surgery, she got the most attention for it (at the time) because of the fascination about her transformation. She had been a U.S. serviceman that had transformed into a blonde bombshell. The news stories fixated on her physical beauty and conventional white feminine looks that appealed to mainstream America. This story reminded me of Caitlyn Jenner’s story, where she went from an award winning Olympic athlete to a stunning model gracing the cover of Vogue magazine. Caitlyn is a complicated and controversial figure because of her political views which seem to conflict with her identity as a trans woman. Caitlyn has a lot of privilege, she already had fame and wealth so she had a platform to speak and the wealth to allow her many surgeries which gave her passing privilege as well. I remember the story of Bruce becoming Caitlyn being a very big deal in the media and how the press fawned over her gorgeous looks. I think it is important to acknowledge how women are still portrayed in the media by their physical beauty before any other attributes. I don’t mean to throw shade at Caitlyn, I just found the similarities between her story and Christine’s very interesting.
Post 2
I chose to focus on the readings that centered on Bisexuality as I am always excited to read or find related material that is accurate, as there is an overall lack of representation of the community. As a psychology major, I have taken a good number of courses within gender and sexuality studies and I have done a good amount of research on bisexual erasure, invisibility, and the impact it has had on the community. Although I would find peer-reviewed journals and articles with data and facts, I would have to dig deep through them all because the sample sizes would always be lacking, or there just wouldnt be a high count of research provided for the bisexual community unlike for the other communities. Sample sizes are very important because if it is small and secluded than it cant really globally reach out to the targeted community. Which researchers mistake often. Which is why I very much agree with Hutchins, when they mentioned how researchers after Kinsey would just lump lesbians, gays, and bisexuals together in studies about non-heterosexuals (pg.9). I believe the reason they also decided to lump them all is to create a bigger sample, but they forget how these results could be harmful as the results arent going to relate to everyone. Those three groups face different forms of oppression and express in different ways and thats before adding cultural context, race, gender, etc..
When reading the Bialogue-groups manifesto on Bisexuality, I thought it was really powerful coming from someone whose Bisexual and have grown up with many friends who have struggled coming out as Bisexual to the immense amount of people who have a lack of understanding or acceptance as Bisexuality being a sexuality. The most annoying thing is how often people attack others who are bisexual for currently having a partner whose of opposite sex and then demeaning someone of their identity and sexuality by then calling them straight or judging them for not being gay enough. We shouldnt have to explain ourselves. A figure I would like to mention, that I look up too is Stephanie Beatriz. She is a bisexual Latina woman whose married to a man that is straight. So many people have denied her sexuality because of that and have felt the need to speak on her behalf. Although she has denied them and shared that just because she is married to a man doesnt mean her attraction to women has just disappeared. She just so happened to fall in love with a man.
This person happens to be a man. Im still bi. (GQ, June 21 2018, Stephanie Beatriz)
Stephanie Beatriz GQ Interview
I do really appreciate how in this blog, they emphasized how bisexuality can have a variety of different meanings and to not assume that bisexuality is a binary or duogamous. Whatever the gender may be for the partnership, it shouldnt dictate whether the person truly is bisexual or not based on who they are coupled with at the moment! Or even who they tend to date the most. It just always seems like there are people who have an opinion on anyones sexuality.
Post 3
I decided to continue reading Susan Stryker’sTransgender Historysince last week I got to learn about the early riots that helped the transgender movement begin. Not to mention, within the the 1950’s transitioning surgeries and hormone treatments began as well. Stryker’s next chapter discussed many great transformations in trans public understanding both good and bad. What I found the most interesting and upsetting was the backlash trans individual’s received from the feminist and gay liberation movements. For example, Beth Elliot an FTM lesbian feminist activist singer, was protested by multiple feminist organizations that “all transexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves” (pg.133). At a time when gender was being policed more than sexual orientation trans peoples fell victim to movements ostracizing them for political gain. Such as Sylvia Rivera, friend to Marsh P Johnson and quoted as being one of the first drag queens to start throwing brick at Stonewall. Rivera was booed off the San Francisco pride parade in 1973 simply because of her gender. The single minded approach that feminist and gay liberalists had is devastating and ironic considering the oppression they were fighting. However, what gets me the most upset is that we are still having this argument today. There are feminist that still believe that trans individuals are perpetuating gender roles of a patriarchal society or that a trans women is not women and can never be a women because they weren’t born that way. Not to mention, the LGBT+ community has subgroups that do not believe that trans individuals belong in the community because being transgender is about gender orientation rather than sexual orientation. I don’t understand the process of empowering a set group of people from patriarchal limitation, while at the same time forcing those same normative beliefs on to another group. 204 A Queer History of the United States
U.S. television debut in February I964 and continuing through the
introduction of the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors,
David Bowie (whose even more outrageous alter ego, Ziggy Star-
dust, would emerge a few years later}, and others, American teens
were faced with rock stars that radically broke from traditional mas-
culine affect and hinted at their own homoerotic longings. Perform-
ers such as Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Aretha Franklin, and Dusty
Springfield gave voice to women’s sexual desires, although in a con-
text of traditional heterosexuality.
The hippie ethos espoused free love, antimilitarism, communal
living, anticapitalism, and a soft version of anarchistic antiestablish-
ment sentiment. It brought together many of the ideas of the Beats,
homophile groups, feminism, and civil rights. It was also resonant
with the nineteenth-century anarchists, free lovers, transcendental-
ists, commune advocates, and some radical labor activists. Gender
roles were quickly changing. Women were beginning to think of
themselves as independent from men and place value on being able
to form friendships with other women. Men-many of whom grew
their hair long, sported earrings, and wore colorful clothing that
would have been condemned as too feminine five years earlier-
were no longer immediately chastised for expressing their feelings.
The cultural terror of men wearing their hair long is a vivid example
of how change in gender affect was deeply threatening. For years,
mainstream media posted the panicked response: “You can’t tell
whether it’s a boy or a girl.”
The flourishing of I96os youth culture, with its integration of
sexuality and sexual freedom into everyday life, was the result of a
slow, incremental, yet constant homosexualization of America. It
was also the beginning of a new kind of homosexuality that was,
first and foremost, a form of political resistance.
TEN
REVOLT/BACKLASH/RESISTANCE
COUNTRY IN REVOLT
T~roughout the I96os and until peace was declared in I 975 , the
V1et.nam War was the continual bac~drop-dramatic, violent, ap-
pallmg~ and tragic-that defined eve;ything that was happening in
the Umted States. The Eisenhower administration had sent close to
nine hundred advisors to South Vietnam to prevent what the U.S.
saw as a potential communist takeover by the North Vietnamese. By
I963, President Kennedy had dispatched sixteen thousand Ameri-
can military personnel. Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the
United States, notes:
From I964 to I972, the,wealthiest and most powerful nation
in the history of the world made a maximum military effort
with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a national~
ist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country-and
failed ….
In the course of that war, there developed in the United
States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever
experienced. 1
By the end of the war, the losses on ali sides were tremendous.
The United States suffered the least, with 58,I59 men dead, 303,635
wounded, and I,7I9 reported missing. The South Vietnamese gov-
ernment reported 220,357 dead and I,I70,ooo wounded. The Na-
205
206 A Queer History of the United States
tional Liberation Front in North Vietnam reported l,176,000 dead
or missing and a minimum of 600,000 wounded. The civilian ca-
sualties were staggering: two million in North Vietnam and over
a million and a half in South Vietnam. United States citizens were
constantly divided over the war, often along generational, race, and
gender lines.
The popular movement against the war started in the early 1960s
with national faith-based peace groups, such as the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (of which Jane Addams was a founding member),
the American Friends Service Committee, and the Catholic Worker
Movement. It then quickly spread to youth-based political groups
such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the
founding groups of the New Left. SDS was organized in 1960 with
the writing of its manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. Maurice
Isserman points out that “in 1961 SDS had roughly 300 dues-paying
members; by 1968 it had roughly those many chapters.”2
The United States saw the worst outbreaks of sustained public vi-
olence since the labor riots and strikes of the 1920s. The most shock-
ing events were the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John Kennedy,
Malcolm X, Marti Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Between
1964 and 1969, close to seventy-five major urban race-related riots
broke out across the country, in cities as large as Los Angeles and
New York and as small as York, Pennsylvania, and Plainfield, New
Jersey. After the King assassination, there were riots in sixty cities.
In total there were close to one hundred and twenty deaths; over
three thousand injured (by a conservative count); over fifty thousand
women, men and children arrested; and billions in damage.
Almost all of the people killed, injured, or arrested were African
Americans. In 1966, the Black Panther Party formed in order to fur-
ther the Black Power movement using more militant and aggressive
tactics than mainstream African American civil rights groups. Pri-
vate and police assassinations of civil rights workers, both black and
white, and of members of Black Power groups were not infrequent.
Along with the Vietnam War and racial tensions, the rise of femi-
nism was dividing the country. After women won suffrage, the or-
ganized feminist movement had little public presence. Beginning in
the l96os-with the approval of the birth control pill by the U.S.
Revolt/Backlash/Resistance 207
Food and Drug Administration-the second wave of the feminist
movement began. For nearly half a century, feminists had identified
lack of reproductive control as a central impediment to women’s
personal, sexual, and economic independence and freedom. The
Pill suddenly, and simply, separated sex from reproduction, mar-
riage, and the family. In 1961 doctors wrote prescriptions {or four
hundred thousand women. A year later, I.2 million women were
taking it. Three years later that number had jumped to 3.6 million
women.
The introduction of the birth control pill, interestingly enough,
helped the cause of homosexual liberation and struck against anti-
homosexual prejudice. The major moral, scientific, and legal ar-
gument against homosexual activity had always been that it does
not lead to reproduction and is thus unnatural. The birth control
pill made the separation between sex and reproduction socially
acceptable.
By the end of the 1960s, radicai feminism added an analysis of
heterosexuality-an analysis often implicit in the writings of the
homophile groups-to the understanding of women’s oppression.
Groups such as the Redstockings and Cell 16 often drew on a Marx-
ist analysis of women as a distinct cultural group and an oppressed
class of people. Like the anarchists and radical labor activists in
the early part of the century, and the more recent Black Power ad-
vocates, radical feminists were interested not in reforming a sys-
tem they considered esseQtially corrupt, but in replacing it with one
that was more just and equitable. Under the umbrella of the Wom-
en’s Liberation Front, radical feminist groups began staging high-
profile demonstrations, including the September 1968 “No More
Miss America!” protest in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The progressive politics of the late 1960s were predicated on the
principle that a person had complete autonomy and control over her
or his body. This included freedom from violence, control of repro-
duction, the ability to engage in any consensual sexual behavior,
and the freedom to take drugs. The massive numbers of men killed
in Vietnam or returning wounded or mutilated was a constant re-
minder-increasingly broadcast on television-of the fragility of the
body as well as the importance of making your own choices about it.
I ,I
, I
I,, 1′,
ii I
,I
208 A Queer History of the United States
This new wave of activism was constituted mainly of younger peo-
ple, because of the strong antiauthoritarian views emanating from
anger over U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.
Like much of the counterculture, political messages were framed
in sexual contexts. To promote draft resistance, folk singer Joan
Baez and her sister Mimi Farina posed for a poster that read “Girls
Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.”
At the August I968 Democratic National Convention in Chi-
cago, conservative Democratic mayor Richard Daley deployed
twenty-three thousand police officers to manage ten thousand anti-
war demonstrators. Violent chaos ensued as police tear-gassed and
beat the mostly peaceful demonstrators. The official government in-
vestigation of the convention violence called it a “police riot.” Cap-
tured on film, the violence was so extreme that it received worldwide
condemnation, even as U.S. polls showed widespread support for
the police. In October I968, SDS passed a resolution titled “The
Elections Don’t Mean Shit-Vote Where the Power Is-Our Power
Is in the Street.”
Following these models, homosexual liberation became predomi-
nantly a political question. In early I969, Carl Wittman, the son of
Communist Party members and a drafter of the Port Huron State-
ment, wrote “A Gay Manifesto” while living in the midst of the
political and gay scenes in San Francisco. It became the defining
document for a new movement. The conclusion lists “An Outline of
Imperatives for Gay Liberation”:
I. Free ourselves: come out everywhere; initiate self defense and
political activity; initiate counter community institutions.
2. Turn other gay people on: talk all the time; understand,
forgive, accept.
3. Free the homosexual in everyone: we’ll be getting a good bit
of shit from threatened latents: be gentle, and keep talking &
acting free.
4. We’ve been playing an act for a long time, so we’re consum-
mate actors. Now we can begin to be, and it’ll be a good
show! 3
Revolt/Backlash/Resistance 209
Wittman’s combination of community building, constructive
dialogue, goodwill, trust, and fun was a mixl;ure of New Left or-
ganizing, homosexual playfulness, and the single most important
directive of gay liberation: to come out. (The term “coming out”
had not been in common use before; previously the metaphor had
been about coming into the homosexual world.) For gay liqeration-
ists, coming out was not simply a matter of self-identification. It was
a radical, public act that would impact every aspect of a person’s
life. The publicness of coming out was a decisive break from the
past. Whereas homophile groups argued that homosexuals could
find safety by promoting privacy, gay liberation argued that safety
and liberation were found only by living in, challenging, and chang-
ing the public sphere.
Physical resistance was the logical course of action in this con-
text. For over two days in August I968, transvestites and street peo-
ple in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District fought with police at the
Compton Cafeteria after manage~ent called in the officers to eject
some rowdy customers. Undoubtedly there were numerous similar,
but unrecorded, incidents in which gay individuals and groups re-
sisted arrest and police violence. But the most famous incident took
place a year later.
In the early hours of Saturday, June 28, I969, police conducted
a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street in the
heart of Greenwich Village. They evicted patrons and arrested some
of the staff. A crowd gathered outside and refused to leave. Clashes
with the police ensued. Even though the bar had been closed, crowds
gathered again and the scene was repeated, with less violence, late
Saturday evening. After a few days of calm, more protests and some
violence occurred the following Wednesday night. The events at
Stonewall were not riots, but sustained street altercations of rau-
cous, sometimes violent, resistance. The larger culture of political
militance was evident in the slogans that emerged immediately after
Stonewall, such as GAY POWER and, as someone chalked on the front
of the now closed Stonewall Inn, THEY WANT us TO FIGHT FOR OUR
COUNTRY [BUT) THEY INVADE OUR RIGHTS. 4
The only viable gay political organization that existed in New
:I’
210 A Queer History of the United States
York at the time was Mattachine. Its members viewed the Stonewall
incident and the highly public political activiti~s that ensued as a dis-
ruptive departure from their political process. On June 28, Matta-
chine members were already working with the police to stop further
protests. They even posted a sign on the closed bar:
WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH
OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP
MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET
CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF
THE VILLAGE-MATTACHINE
At one of the last Mattachine meetings before the police attack
on the Stonewall Inn, Jim Fouratt, a younger member, insisted: “All
the oppressed have to unite! The system keeps us all weak by keep-
ing us separate.”5
Stonewall was less a turning point than a final stimulus in a se-
ries of public altercations. A coalition of disgruntled Mattachine
members, along with lesbians and gay men who identified with the
pro-Black Power, antiwar New Left, called for a meeting on July c
24, 1969. The flyer announcing the meeting was headlined, “Do you
think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are.”
This radical change in rhetoric was indicative of fiercely antihier-
archal, free-for-all, consensus-driven discussion. Out of it emerged
the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The group took its name from the
Women’s Liberation Front, which in turn had taken its name from
the Vietcong National Liberation Front. More traditionally anar-
chist than leftist, the lack of structure and clash of ideas in GLF was
perfectly indicative of the intellectual, social, sexual, and political
excitement of the time. A GLF member stated that “GLF is more of
a process than an organization.”6 But it was a powerful process that
produced results. Within a year, GLF had organized Sunday night
meetings, nineteen “cells” or action groups, twelve consciousness-
raising groups, an ongoing radical study group, an all-men’s meet-
ing, a women’s caucus, three communal living groups, and a series
of successful community dances, in addition to publishing the news-
paper Come Out! The publication became a model for numerous
Revolt/Backlash/Resistance 211
highly influential LGBT community newspapers, including Michi~
gan’s Gay Liberator, Philadelphia’s Gay Alternative, San Francisco’s
Gay Sunshine, and Boston’s Fag Rag and Gay Community News.
Hundreds of independent GLF groups immediately sprang up on
college campuses and in cities across the country.
GLF’s open-ended process, as well as its refusal to see1 antigay
bias or hatred as disconnected from other forms of oppression, nei-
ther resulted in hoped-for coalitions nor appealed to all members.
Women’s liberation, Black Power, antiwar, and labor groups were
unwilling to work with GLF because of their own dislike or fear of
homosexuality.
By November 1969, after a discussion of donating money to the
Black Panthers, some GLF members decided to start the Gay Ac-
tivists Alliance (GAA). Thi~ new organization would, according to
its constitution, focus only on achieving civil rights for gay people,
“disdaining all ideologies, whethei; political or social, and forbear-
ing alliance with any other organization.” 7 Although GAA dis-
dained official political ideologies, it was forthright in confronting
antihomosexual bias in media, legal, and social venues. Much of its
power came from its “zaps” -high-profile public confrontations of
people and institutions that promoted antihomosexual sentiments-
which garnered enormous attention and brought LGBT issues into
the media.
GLF and GAA coexisted until GLF’s demise in 1972. As GAA
grew and some of its leaders began to have political ambitions, their
agenda became more reformist and conservative. Transgender activ-
ists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson had left GLF to help form
GAA, but ultimately found themselves, and issues of gender identity,
excluded. In 1970 they started Street Transvestite Action Revolution
(STAR), which became the foundational group for contemporary
transgender activism. By 1974 GAA was crumbling, and prominent
members such as Bruce Voeller left to start the National Gay Task
Force (now the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force). When GAA
finally folded in 1980, it had, according to historian David Eisen-
bach, reverted to GLF’s inclusive political analysis. s
The split between the pragmatism of GAA and the idealism
of GLF echoed the earlier division within Mattachine and can be
212 A Queer History of the United States
traced back to nineteenth-century political discussions of suffrage,
free love, labor reform, and anarchism. GLF’s comprehensive vision
of social justice was mirrored in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “no one
is free, until everyone is free.” This approach distanced King from
many civil rights activists and supporters as he began to vocally op-
pose the war in Vietnam, in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to
Break Silence” speech, and to connect capitalism to black oppres-
sion. GAA’s single-issue politics had a much greater impact than
GLF on mainstream gay political organizing. It became the template
for the contemporary gay rights movement, which works to change,
not overthrow, the system.
GLF had a more lasting impact on the formation of gay and les-
bian youth groups across the nation. Between 1969 and 1980 nearly
fifty youth support groups-aimed at lesbians and gay men in their
teens-were founded. Some of these were grassroots and came out
of the gay liberation movement; others were founded by progres-
sive social service organizations. 9 The advent of these groups made
perfect sense, since gay liberation emerged, in part, from the youth
counterculture, but also because young people were engaging in
sex earlier. Lesbian and gay youth now had a political and social
framework in which to declare and celebrate their identity. These
youth groups provided them with a vital social outlet that was badly
needed, since underage people could not go to bars to meet people,
and coming out at school or home could be dangerous.
The men in GLF and GAA had grown up in a prefeminist world.
Their actions, even after lesbians confronted them, often reflected
their upbringing, which was not to take women and their concerns
seriously. Nevertheless, many lesbians joined these groups because
they were not welcome in the National Organization of Women
(NOW) or even in some radical feminist groups. Betty Friedan’s
antilesbian sentiments were so present in NOW that a group of lesbi-
ans, including Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown, formed the Lavender
Menace, a guerilla action group. They confronted NOW’s mem-
bers at its Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970, where
they passed out their manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman.”
A year later, NOW passed a resolution affirming that lesbian rights
were “a legitimate concern for feminism.” But a critical break had
Revolt/Backlash/Resistance 213
occurred. The Lavender Menace, who now called themselves Radi-
calesbians and understood that their concerns were distinct from
those of heterosexual women and gay men, began a distinct move-
ment: lesbian feminism.
Lesbian feminism created a new political and social identity for
lesbians that had not existed previously. Jill Johnston, a Nrw York-
based dance critic and activist nationally famous for her outspoken-
ness and flair for publicity, stated in her 1973 book Lesbian Nation:
The Feminist Solution:
Historically the lesbian had two choices: being criminal or
going straight. The present revolutionary project is the cre-
ation of a legitimate state defined by women. Only women
can do this. Going straight is legitimizing your oppression. As
was being criminal. A male society will not permit any other
choice for a woman. 10
Faderman describes lesbian feminism as being “pro-women and
pro-children” and compares it to the utopian vision of reformers
such as Jane Addams. 11 In the early 1970s, women started national
networks of small presses, such as Daughters Inc., which published
Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle.
They also founded over a hundred newspapers, magazines such as
Amazon Quarterly, and music cooperatives and festivals such as the
Michigan Womyn’s Mqsic Festival. Many lesbians still worked with
gay men and heterosexual feminists on shared concerns, and lesbian
feminism addressed many of the concerns that women in the Daugh-
ters of Bilitis had voiced about lesbians in the workplace, lesbian
health, and legal discrimination that lesbians faced in relationships.
But a world centered around women brought new ideas. Lesbian
feminists set up health clinics, created grassroots political organiza-
tions, and instituted a widespread national network of communal
living collectives that, although unaffiliated, saw themselves as part
of a movement.
In their pursuit of making the world a safer place for children
and women, some lesbian feminists, in conjunction with hetero-
sexual feminists, articulated views about sex and gender perceived
214 A Queer History of the United States
as antithetical to radical feminism and gay liberation. As a group,
they were often called “cultural feminists” by their detractors. They
criticized nontraditional sexual activity such as SIM and bondage,
and they condemned drag queens and drag shows (which they saw
as a parody of women’s oppression). They offered harsh critiques
of transsexual and transgender people, such as Janice Raymond’s
1979 The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, in
which she argued that sex-reassignment surgery is violence against
women’s bodies. In the mid to late 1970s they conducted censor-
ship campaigns against pornography, which they saw as a cause of
rape. Many of these positions generated heated, and often angry,
discussion. Historian Alice Echols argues that “advocating sexual
repression as a solution to violence against women [ends up] mobi-
lizing women around their fears rather than their visions.” 12 Lesbian
theorist Gayle Rubin makes concrete comparisons of these policies
to the ideas of the social purity movement.
The exciting, confusing, and often contradictory whirlpool of
LGBT politics in the years after Stonewall helped, along with other
forces, to shape the movement. It is striking, however, to realize
that the numbers of people actively involved in these organizations
were minuscule. As with the Mattachine, the Daughters of Bilitis,
the Women’s Liberation Front, and the Black Panther Party, the
work of a few people in small organizations touched the lives of
large numbers of people and changed the world. One way the LGBT
political groups did this was through their enormous influence on
mainstream culture, now that homosexuality was more openly dis-
cussed than ever before. Publishing, film, TV, and the press reached
millions of Americans.
Much of the mainstream press was implicitly positive. On Octo-
ber 31, 1969, just four months after the Stonewall conflict, Time had
a cover story called “The Homosexual in America.” The article in-
side featured photos of gay liberationists on a picket line and a drag
queen in a beauty contest. A discussion sponsored by the magazine
among a panel of “experts,” including psychiatrists, clergy, liberals,
and gay activists, was clearly won by the latter two. As Time noted,
“the love that once dared not speak its name now can’t keep its mouth
shut.” The April 1971 issue of Playboy featured a long “roundtable”
Revolt/Backlash/Resistance 215
on homosexuality that was clearly skewed against the conservative
voices. The December 31, 1971, issue of Life.included an eleven-page
spread titled “Homosexuals in Revolt.” It was decidedly affirmative,
featuring numerous upbeat photos of lesbian and gay activists.
The mainstream publishing industry, having discovered that pos-
itive depictions of lesbian and gay male life were a niohe market,
quickly published books on the subject. In Sappho Was a Right-On
Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism, published in 1972, Sid-
ney Abbott and Barbara Love argued-as Phillip Wylie had in the
l94o
