A Queer History of the United States (33 page)

The political and legal backlash engendered by the AIDS epidemic was tremendous, but the anger with which the LGBT community responded was fueled by other events as well. On June 30, 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in
Bowers v. Hardwick
that there was no constitutional protection for homosexual sodomy. The decision was an affirmation of the vast legal undermining of the LGBT community that had been happening since 1977. Inflammatory rhetoric ran so high that the moralism and bias of the past paled in comparison. In a March 18, 1986,
New York Times
opinion piece, esteemed political commentator William F. Buckley urged that “everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” The Reagan administration, meanwhile, had done almost nothing in the early years of the epidemic. The president himself—in what can only be seen as a conscious, and shocking, act of indifference—had mentioned AIDS publicly only twice, briefly, before giving a speech during the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington on May 31, 1987. This was after 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, of whom 20,849 had died.

Two months earlier, at a meeting in New York City, playwright and activist Larry Kramer called for a new, grassroots AIDS organization that would perform direct action and demand the basic health care, civil rights, legal protections, and respect that Americans were guaranteed under the Constitution. Two days later, three hundred people turned out for a meeting to form such a group. The result was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). In many ways, ACT UP was a return to the raucous street actions of the Gay Liberation Front and the “zaps” of the Gay Activist Alliance. But it was also a repudiation of the play-within-the-system approach of the reformist LGBT rights groups. Kramer was explicit about this in his original speech, in which he stated that the group Gay Men’s Health Crisis, of which he was a cofounder, had no political clout in the legal or medical world. National and local groups, such as New York’s Lambda Legal Defense and Education Foundation and Boston’s AIDS Law Project of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, were doing necessary legal work. But the instances of discrimination were so pervasive, and enforcement often so weak, that there was still much more to be done. With devastation increasingly evident in the gay male community and anger and frustration mounting, new tactics had to be tried and new energy harnessed. Like the Gay Liberation Front, ACT UP was predicated on the principle, traced back to anarchist thinking as well as labor and other social justice reform groups, that the people who are affected by injustice are the most effective in changing their own circumstances.

ACT UP took to the streets almost immediately. On March 24, three weeks after the first meeting, ACT UP members marched on Wall Street demanding an end to profiteering by drug companies and easier access to experimental HIV drugs. Seventeen people were arrested for civil disobedience. Within months, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would shorten the drug approval process by two years. On April 15, ACT UP marched on New York’s General Post Office, where thousands were waiting in line to file tax returns. This was the first time ACT UP used the image of the upside-down pink triangle and the phrase “Silence = Death.” In June ACT UP, along with other national AIDS groups, took part in civil disobedience at the White House to protest the federal government’s inaction on AIDS. As with the Gay Liberation Front, within months of ACT UP’s formation, local offshoots were started in cities across the country.

But ACT UP did not specifically see itself as an LGBT group. All communities were affected by AIDS, but in particular impoverished communities, communities of color, women, immigrants, and—as the epidemic spread—children. ACT UP’s single-issue mandate translated into a multicommunity coalition.

During this time, many LGBT people began using the word “queer” to describe themselves and their culture. This was partly an act of reclaiming language, just as gay liberationists had used once-pejorative words such as “fag” and “dyke” in a new, positive context that could change their political meaning. Unlike those terms, “queer” could be used to describe people with a wide range of sexual identities who were working in coalition. For the constituents of ACT UP, using this word was a reflection of their political vision and actions. Just as “queer” had been angrily shouted at lesbians and gay men in past decades, ACT UP and other activists now shouted the word as a declaration of difference and strength. As members of Queer Nation, a direct action group founded by members of ACT UP in 1990, would chant at their marches, “We’re Here. We’re Queer. Get Used To It.”

It had been less than forty years since Harry Hay met with his friends to start the Mattachine Society, but sexuality identity, political activism, and the world had changed tremendously. The Gay Liberation Front had protested with hand-lettered signs and banners made of bedsheets. ACT UP, in an age of new technologies, was able to reach a wider audience and get its message across with more sophistication and media flair. Posters and T-shirts created by the Gran Fury collective, a working project within ACT UP, were comparable to professional adverting art; some of them even included references to commercial advertisements. The messages continually hammered home the idea that social ignorance and negligence led directly to death. One sign, with an image of a bloody handprint in the center, read:

THE GOVERNMENT HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS

ONE AIDS DEATH EVERY HALF HOUR

The new technologies also reflected the original message of gay liberation. One poster announced:

I AM OUT

therefore

I AM.

ACT UP also branched into other media as well. After a January 1988 article in
Cosmopolitan
magazine assured women they could have no-risk vaginal intercourse with an HIV-positive man without using a condom, five hundred ACT UP demonstrators, organized by the Women’s Caucus of ACT UP, picketed the publication’s offices. Two women in the caucus made a documentary,
Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists Say NO to Cosmo,
that detailed and explained the action; it went on to win awards and was used in fund-raising and future organizing. In 1989 several ACT UP members started DIVA TV (DIVA was an acronym for “dammed interfering video activists”) to document ACT UP activity and the AIDS epidemic. These documentary efforts were an acknowledgment that the mainstream media could not be trusted to tell the truth—a theme in many ACT UP posters—and that it was incumbent on activists to make certain that their own history would be preserved accurately.

ACT UP was the most effective political action group the LGBT movement had ever produced. Its constant demands for legal and medical accountability were often met with success. This was largely because ACT UP was, by intent, a bold, theatrical move. Throughout the history of the United States, entertainment, theater, film, television, and the fine arts have, through visceral response, connected people of different identities and allowed them to reimagine their lives. This kind of social justice is more than legal or even political. Sometimes, as with the patriotic statues of Harriet Hosmer and the photography of F. Holland Day, art has helped viewers understand, and maybe heal, the damage of war. Other times, the subversion of gender norms in art—such as the cross-dressing acts of vaudeville, the drag shows of the USO, and the lesbian pulps—has had both overt and subtle implications for everyday life. Similarly, the power of ACT UP’s theatricality came from bringing issues of gender and sexual expression to the forefront in a way that continued to resonate in unlikely places, for audiences and actors alike. To echo the words of Carl Wittman, it was “a good show.”

ACT UP’s defiant theatricality was evident in one of its most famous political protests. On December 12, 1989, over five thousand activists, including members of ACT UP and a separate but affiliated group, Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM), held a “Stop the Church” demonstration in front of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Over a hundred of them entered the cathedral, lay down in the aisles, and were arrested for civil disobedience. They were protesting the influence that the archdiocese and Cardinal John O’Connor had exerted on city and state policy relating to AIDS, safe-sex education, sexuality, and reproductive rights. The archdiocese had lobbied heavily, with expensive public advertisements as well as political pressure, to stop a program that dispensed condoms in public high schools and youth homeless shelters, as well as to stop needle exchange programs, which were proven effective in preventing HIV transmission in intravenous drug users. The archdiocese also promoted the falsehood that condom use was an ineffective means of controlling HIV transmission. In addition, it lobbied against any HIV and sex education that did not promote abstinence as the only way to avoid AIDS and pregnancy. O’Connor was quoted as saying, “The truth is not in condoms or clean needles. These are lies, lies perpetrated often for political reasons on the part of public officials . . . [and] some health care professionals.”
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The Stop the Church protest received enormous attention, because of both its size and the sheer audacity of confronting O’Connor in his own church. ACT UP’s response to O’Connor was succinct and pointed to the high stakes involved: “The Catholic Church has long taught men and women to loathe their bodies and to fear their sexual natures. This particular vision of good and evil continues to bring suffering and even death.”
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The Catholic Church was no different, or worse, than any other organization in United States history that had tried to regulate and control women’s and men’s sexual desires, bodies, and actions.

ACT UP, like many forms of art, was known for “going too far.” But the people who have had to go too far to assert their own independence and deeply held beliefs about social justice—such as Anne Hutchinson, Jemima Wilkinson, Harriet Tubman, Walt Whitman, Victoria Woodhull, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hay, and Bayard Rustin—have made the most lasting changes in American social policy, political beliefs, and everyday lives. Their powerful effects on how we think about gender and sexuality happened both gradually and, under extreme suffering, more immediately, just as wars, after they are ostensibly concluded, can profoundly redefine what it means to be an American. America was a war zone during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, but it had always been a theater of control and liberation, where bodies fall and boundaries break in the fervor of solidarity.

Epilogue

A Queer History of the United States
stops at 1990, but LGBT communities have seen enormous changes since then. By the late 1980s, the rise of the so-called “Gaybe Boom” was beginning, as increasing numbers of children were born into two-parent same-sex households. Lesléa Newman's children's book
Heather Has Two Mommies—
which became a target in the culture wars of the 1990s—was emblematic of this sea change in the community. The rise of these new lesbian and gay families—different from earlier families, in which children were being raised by same-sex parents but had been born into heterosexual relationships—opened up a new field of family law. This included foundational struggles for LGBT people's rights concerning second-parent adoptions, raising foster children, and accessing sperm banks, as well as aspects of immigration law, such as seeking political sanctuary in the U.S. as an LGBT person from another country.

The LGBT movement, as distinct from the LGBT community, has also been involved in the fight to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the battle to repeal the U.S. military's “don't ask, don't tell” policy, and the Supreme Court's 2003 decision in
Lawrence v. Texas
that finally, after more than five hundred years, threw out the sodomy laws that had plagued lesbians and gay men. Most recently, the movement has been fighting to secure same-sex marriage on both state and federal levels.

Along with these changes, three other major cultural shifts have taken the LGBT community to places no one had ever dreamed of. The first is the growing presence of more LGBT youth coming out earlier and challenging basic perceptions—not so much perceptions of what it means to be queer in American culture, but what it means to be sexual, to have a sexual identity. Youth sexuality has often been, like homosexuality, unspeakable in our culture. This has been America's dirty little secret: teens and children think about sex. Some have sexual desires for members of their own gender. Young people coming out earlier, and often finding support in their homes and schools, is a major political advancement. For over a century, charges of “molestation,” “corruption of a minor,” and “recruitment” have been used—explicitly by J. Edgar Hoover, Anita Bryant, and others, and implicitly by many who are opposed to same-sex marriage—to demonize lesbians and gay men and deny them full citizenship. There may always be bias against LGBT people, but the charges of molestation will eventually fade as more youth come out.

Politically, the LGBT movement has made many strides and has faced many defeats. Culturally, there have been far more gains than losses. During the last twenty years, representations of LGBT people in film, on television, and on the Internet have proliferated so rapidly that they have become central to how Americans conceptualize popular culture. Major Hollywood films featuring central LGBT characters began to be made in the late 1960s and 1970s, starting with the taboo-breaking
The Killing of Sister George
and
Boys in the Band.
More recently, films such as
Boys Don't Cry,
Brokeback Mountain,
and
The Kids Are All Right
have been nominated for, and won, major awards.

Television has replicated this trend. Queer characters began appearing on television in the early 1970s, but
Will and Grace,
in 1999, was the first time that homosexuality became integral to a show's narrative. Since then it has become common to have openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters on television dramas, comedies, reality series, and animated shows. The variety of representations is surprising.
The Education of Max Bickford,
in 2001, featured television's first recurring transgender character; and 2003's
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
presented gay men as Cinderella-style fairy godmothers making heterosexual men look more attractive; in 2009
Modern Family
presented viewers, for the first time, with a family consisting of gay male partners and an adopted daughter. The 2009 hit television show
Glee
happily uses gay male and coded lesbian stereotypes, presuming that the viewer is in on the joke. These images were unthinkable in 1990, much less in 1969 at the birth of the gay liberation movement.

Would LGBT people then have approved of such images? Certainly they would have been startled, but they may have been dismayed as well. As wonderful and groundbreaking as many of these shows and characters are, they are political only in the most narrow sense of the word. They almost always reaffirm traditional gender and sexual stereotypes, rarely show LGBT characters as central protagonists, and make the argument that mainstream culture should accept LGBT people, never questioning how gender and sexuality are viewed in normative culture. These characters and shows, important in so many ways, are also a reminder that LGBT visibility is no substitute for political thought or analysis.

News as History/History as News

Clearly, much has occurred in the lives of American LGBT people since 1990, but at this point it is news, not history. In many respects, news is easy to analyze. We see it analyzed every day on CNN, in the
New York Times,
and on blogs. We do it ourselves over coffee with friends and in our heads when we are driving or walking to work. But history calls for more than an analysis.

There are many ways to understand the LGBT movement's recent work using the interpretations I have offered in this book. Securing legal equality under U.S. law has been the major project of the LGBT movement. It is a traditional American approach to acceptance and freedom. Legal equality, often based on precedent, is a broad web that includes obscure, sometimes surprising, links to non-LGBT-related history. In her essay “What Married Same-Sex Couples Owe to Hippie Communes,” Nancy Polikoff details how the 1973 Supreme Court ruling
USDA v. Moreno,
which allowed hippie communes to receive food stamps, was pivotal in the Court's 1996
Romer v. Evans
decision, which forbade the state of Colorado from treating homosexuals as a group different from other groups. A 2010 U.S. District Court decision also used
USDA v. Moreno
to argue that same-sex couples married in Massachusetts should be married under federal law as well.

America is, of course, still striving to fully realize the constitutional ideal of equal protection under the law. What if equality under the law works against another unrealized American ideal: individual freedom and autonomy? The desire for legal equality has moved some to argue that same-sex marriage is a social good, not because it is equal to heterosexual marriage but because it is morally or ethically better than other same-sex relationships or sexual interactions. For instance, William N. Eskridge Jr. writes in
The Case for Same-Sex Marriage
, “Human history repeatedly testifies to the attractiveness of domestication born of interpersonal commitment, a signature of married life. It should not have required the AIDS epidemic to alert us to the problem of sexual promiscuity.” Later, after arguing that “sexual variety has not been liberating for gay men,” he notes that “a self-reflective gay community ought to embrace marriage for its potentially civilizing effect on young and old alike.”
1

These socially conservative views have clear and firm roots in the social purity movement. They are no different from the views of many women and men in the nineteenth century who viewed male lust as a problem that was infecting the entire nation. In these arguments, equality under the Constitution is conflated with pleas to the moral benefits and advantages of marriage. Ted Olson, in his June 2010 closing arguments to repeal California's Proposition 8, which limited marriage in that state to a man and a woman, said:

Marriage is the most important relation in life. . . . It is the foundation of society. It is essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness. . . . The plaintiffs have said that marriage means to them freedom, pride. . . . Dignity. Belonging. Respect. Equality. Permanence. Acceptance. Security. Honor. Dedication. And a public commitment to the world. . . . The plaintiffs have no interest in changing marriage or deinstitutionalizing marriage. They desire to marry because they cherish the institution.
2

Such language is antithetical to the other major historical root of the LGBT movement: the fight to eliminate or limit the state's involvement in consensual relationships. It is also not the language of equality under the law. Some same-sex marriage supporters believe that protecting the family and the institution of marriage is a convincing argument to win over more conservative heterosexuals to support same-sex marriage. Many LGBT people, like many people in America, agree with this language of protection themselves, even though half of married heterosexuals get divorced. It is language that, twenty years ago, would have been rare in the LGBT movement. Why is it being used now?

There are some tentative answers to what, historically, has caused this shift. The first is that the baby boomers, those women and men born between 1940 and 1955, may have passed through their age of rebellion. But there are plenty of LGBT people in their fifties and sixties who resist this language and the deeply conservative enshrinement of marriage as foundational to American society. There are also plenty of LGBT people in their twenties who accept this idea of marriage—and plenty of twenty-year-olds who are acting like 1970s radicals in their rejection of it.

A more nuanced explanation might point to how our current emphasis on the LGBT family and on family law could be a lingering reaction to the effects of both the Anita Bryant campaign and the AIDS epidemic. The backlash of the late 1970s was devastating to the LGBT community. Homosexuals, particularly gay males, were accused of being dangerous child molesters, recruiting children for sexual and political purposes. The presence of the new lesbian and gay family is a strong statement against the idea of the queer as child molester. It is saying, “We are not immoral monsters, we are mothers and fathers and families.” Such a statement, while true and powerful, has still not prevented the heterosexual-family-oriented social purity advocates from protesting same-sex marriage and parenting.

A third factor is the effect that the devastation of the AIDS epidemic had on the LGBT community. Throughout the epidemic, gay men whose lovers were dying found themselves without any legal rights. Unable to visit their sick partners in the hospital, make medical decisions, or deal with complicated finances, they were legal strangers to their lovers and often treated horrendously by medical professionals and their lovers' families. These examples demonstrate beyond a doubt that same-sex relationships need some sort of legal protections. It is telling that this specific historical fact of the AIDS epidemic almost never surfaces in written discussions or arguments about same-sex marriage. Equally telling is that when the AIDS epidemic is mentioned in relation to same-sex marriage, particularly from within the lesbian and gay community, it is always to reinforce the myth that the promiscuity that allegedly led to the epidemic would never have happened if gay men had been allowed to marry. These deeply conservative responses to the nightmares of the late 1970s and 1980s are saying, “We are not obsessed with sex, we are good parents, we do not hurt children, we are not promiscuous, and we want to get married. We are, in fact, good Americans, just like you.”

While we are all Americans—and heterosexuals may be a lot queerer than they think—being “just like you” is not what all Americans want. Historically, “just like you” is the great American lie. The overwhelming, even giddy, diversity of America precludes such simple analogies. “Just like” is often a false argument. In the past decade, the argument that same-sex marriage is “just like” inter-racial marriage has led to far more misunderstanding and anger than agreement and clarity.

As I noted in the introduction, the theme of sexual repression—from the social purity movement, conservative politicians, and even some LGBT people—has been a constant in my story. The tension between control and liberation, alive within every American, is present in the changes in gender and sexuality brought by wartime social adjustments and the many forms of artistic expression that passed the censors. When thinking about advancing the needs and desires of all Americans today, there is another reality that has shaped the lives of all Americans: violence.

H. Rap Brown, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a member of the Black Panthers, famously said that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” Historically, America is a violent society. Much of this violence is enacted on disenfranchised groups. If there is any historic similarity between these groups, I argue tentatively, it is being the target of individual and state violence. The violence faced by each disenfranchised group was unique in its structure and intensity. The similarity is that the full range of violence—emotional intimidation, physical threats, illegal searches, overt blackmail, and horrendous all-out attacks—is never aimed only at one minority community. When one minority is targeted by violence, some aspect of this violence will eventually, or quickly, be used on another.

This point is closely connected to the reality that in America, equality under the law is a complicated affair. Certainly it is true that while laws are for everyone, they are often enforced mainly against the disenfranchised. As Anatole France wrote in his 1894 novel
The Red Lily,
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Equality under the law is one of the American ideals of freedom, but its worth depends on the fairness of the law and its intended effects. Nineteenth-century social purity advocates promoted marriage laws to regulate sexuality. Contemporary LGBT activists promote marriage laws as equality. Both groups' arguments are antithetical to the idea that an individual's relationships and sexuality should be free of state regulation and the violence or repression that may result. LGBT people were then, and are now, on both sides of this argument.