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McAdam. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency. [Mar. 6th, 2007|04:44 pm]
McAdam, Doug. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

With this ambitious work, Doug McAdam develops a new theoretical model to explain the rise and fall of the modern civil rights movement. His argument is that classical theories underestimate the rational political pragmatism of collective action while resource mobilization theory overestimates movement dependence on sympathetic elites. His proposed alternative, the political process model, emphasizes movement cohesion and organizational strength in the context of available political opportunities and, at later stages, the emergence of allies and opponents. He illustrates the utility of this model by applying it to the black protest movement divided into four distinct stages: repression and institution-building response (1876-1954), initiation of assertive collective action (1955-1960), ascension of the movement to a position of power in mainstream politics (1961-1965), and deterioration of movement power and influence (1966-1970). Essentially, McAdam argues that the movement succeeded because it developed out of a strong set of indigenous institutions, took advantage of structural shifts in regional and national politics, and sustained a broad-based program capable of transcending class and race divisions. Movement decline therefore can be understood in terms of declining relevance of indigenous institutions, disempowering shifts in the political structure, and, most significantly, increasingly inability to achieve consensus regarding the aims and strategies of the movement.
McAdam’s primary objective in this book is to make the case for the application of political process theory to the study of social movements. Therefore, he devotes three early chapters to exploring the weaknesses of established theories and promoting the strengths of political process. Classical theories, according to McAdam, are rooted in assumptions that in a pluralistic society such as the U.S. no group dominates and every constituency has opportunities to exercise political influence through democratic channels. Therefore, any individual or group that seeks to organize outside the frameworks of established democratic institutions must be doing so for idiosyncratic psychological reasons rather than for political expediency. McAdam argues that the status of blacks in the segregation-era South provides unambiguous proof that significant sectors of society may face systematic exclusion from equal participation in conventional politics. Resource mobilization theory, as McAdam interprets it, takes the opposite position regarding the distribution of power and argues that elites exercise so much control over society that social movements require elite patronage in order to effect meaningful social change. McAdam criticizes this position by arguing that elites enjoy only a tenuous hold on power and are by necessity highly responsive to well-organized mass movements. Thus, he proposes a theoretical framework that emphasizes the organizational capabilities of movement agencies and replaces elite patronage with the less hierarchical concept of political opportunity structure. McAdam suffers from some conceptual fuzziness here, as he does not seem to realize that shifts in political opportunity structure often arise due to cleavages among elites. The difference may often be more in nuance than in substance. Furthermore, he criticizes resource mobilization theorists for studying many different kinds of political phenomena without clearly defining the limits of its applicability, but in his own analysis he uses the term insurgency to describe everything from sit-ins and boycotts to riots and revolutions. Nonetheless, political process theory makes an important contribution in that it places the rational agency of activists and their networks at the center of movement dynamics.
McAdam’s theory appears to wield significant explanatory power with regard to the rise of the civil rights movement. His first chapter of empirical analysis demonstrates how African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction environment faced severe limitations in political opportunities due to the determination of the white power structure to assert dominance over them. However, within a few decades of the imposition of Jim Crow institutions had emerged that would ultimately cause Jim Crow’s dismantling. McAdam focuses on the growth of the NAACP, especially in the South, as well as the increasing influence of the urban black church and rapidly growing black colleges. He credits the NAACP’s early legal efforts with contributing to a steep decline in lynchings in the 1930s, thus increasing political opportunities and enabling more assertive activism. He also cites the increasing distaste for overt racism in the context of a changing international climate as providing opportunities for social change, but he ignores the possibility that Cold War pressures could have caused elements of political elites to encourage black equality as a bulwark against embarrassing Soviet denunciations.
When the mass social movement develops with the Montgomery bus boycott, McAdam’s theory seems accurately to describe how the institutional power of urban churches and a community-wide consensus over goals and strategies produced a sustained and successful mass movement. However, his reliance on articles from the New York Times Index may skew his perception of how attitudes within the black community evolved in the years following Montgomery. The Times is generally regarded as representing a mainstream white liberal perspective, and according to a resource mobilization interpretation that segment of elite society may well have had an interest in supporting moderate racial reform. Had McAdam gathered his data from urban black newspapers instead of the Times, he may have come away with a very different view of the evolving relationships among activist groups by the early 1960s. McAdam acknowledges the rise of SNCC and CORE as institutional challengers to the more conservative reformers in the NAACP and SCLC, but he does not acknowledge the degree to which the sit-in strategy evolved out of student frustration with what they saw as the inability of the established organizations to provide strong leadership. Also, McAdam ignores the efforts already underway during these years to challenge economic and social inequality outside the South. Presenting the civil rights movement in the early 1960s as a southern phenomena committed to non-violent resistance ignores the powerful model for radical militancy provided by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. McAdam acknowledges later in the book that the initial response to the urban rioting of 1966-67 was a concerted governmental response to the problem of black economic disempowerment. Perhaps the Civil Rights Act could likewise be interpreted partially as an effort to forestall the growing popularity of radicalism within the black student movement.
McAdam interprets the achievements of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts as resulting from the efforts of a unified, well-organized civil rights movement that successfully formed alliances with white liberal constituencies. He observes the decline of the movement in the second half of the 1960s due to increasingly visible contention among movement leaders and organizations, the absence of strong black institutions in the battleground cities of the North and the West, declining cooperation with white allies, and emerging opposition in the form of a conservative countermovement and law enforcement oppression. Clearly, a large number of relevant facts and highly visible events illustrate the merits of his argument. However, this interpretation seems all too conveniently to be the viewpoint that one would expect from the readership of the New York Times. McAdam emphasizes the dissolution of the movement into factions, and in doing so he both overstates the unanimity of the earlier period and understates the turn toward radicalism that occurred throughout the movement during this time. He ignores the widespread belief among black activists that many white allies supported political equality for blacks while maintaining assumptions of white socioeconomic superiority. Furthermore, he ignores the significance of the black power movement as a cultural and intellectual challenge to centuries of internalized notions of black inferiority. McAdam only sees a decline of political efficacy, but the late 1960s also represents the first time that thousands of African-Americans across the nation proudly declared themselves to be the social equals of white America. This social transformation, whatever its political consequences, may very well prove as significant a legacy as the legal reforms of 1954 and 1964.
McAdam presents a viable model and provides rigorously researched and coded evidence that supports his interpretation of the modern civil rights movement. However, he does not in the end disprove the notion from resource mobilization theory that alliances with elites drive those social movements that achieve significant political outcomes, and he fails to account for the important psychological and sociological impact of social movements regardless of those political outcomes.
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Friedan. The Feminine Mystique. [Feb. 27th, 2007|04:10 pm]
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963.

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan provocatively argues that women in post-WWII America were trapped in emotionally and intellectually unsatisfying roles as mothers, wives, and homemakers. Fooled by mass marketing and societal expectation into striving for a self-negating ideal of servile domesticity, these women increasingly felt alienation, frustration, and disillusionment. Friedan explores the historical development of this dehumanizing false consciousness, analyzes the psychological and sociological consequences, and proposes that women seek fulfillment of their potential as human beings by refocusing on education and a life outside the home.
This is a difficult book to review. On the one hand, Friedan’s overall objectives, increased prioritization on women’s higher education and the actualization of women’s human potential, are unquestionably noble and necessary causes. She writes clear, compelling prose that analyzes the problem in powerfully unambiguous ways and frames the solution as a movingly moralistic mission. This may very well be the way that she had to write the book given her goal of mounting fundamental challenges to a social structure that virtually imprisoned women’s intellects. However, the result is a polemic that misinterprets statistics, ignores issues that transcend gender, oversimplifies complex psychological and sociological phenomena, makes absurd and hysterical analogies, and insults the intelligence of women who choose to prioritize family. Many of the social ills that Friedan attributes to the intellectual and professional diminution of women continue to persist in the present day, despite enormous progress in the valuation of women’s education and the virtual disappearance of the full-time housewife. In short, while the book’s message is valid and vital, the scholarship is deeply flawed.
Despite its shortcomings, the book makes a powerful statement about the collective anxiety and ennui of a certain sector of seemingly successful middle-class women. The genesis of the book revolves around a survey Friedan conducted among her Smith College cohort 15 years after graduation. Most of these women enjoyed a high level of material prosperity, but they expressed broadly a sense of dissatisfaction with their lives. Friedan examines this contradiction by looking at the values promoted in women’s magazines in the period just prior to WWII, when she and her cohort were attending Smith, and contrasts these values with those found in women’s magazines of the late 1950s. This evidence appears to demonstrate that young women’s role models in the earlier period were much more assertive and career-oriented. In addition, Friedan interviews current students at her elite women’s college alma mater and finds that these young women are far less academically inclined and far more focused on marriage than were Smith students of 20 years before. The author supports this anecdotal evidence with statistical data showing a dramatic decrease in the ratio of women to men attending higher education during this time period. In addition, Friedan provides statistics showing that women were getting married and having children at a younger age. Clearly, she argues, something terrible had happened to cause a regression in women’s ambitions.
In defining the problem, Friedan’s analysis suffers from a selective interpretation of the evidence. With regard to changes in women’s magazines, she is always looking at different magazines in the two time periods rather than tracking changes over time in the same magazine. What Friedan interprets as changes in values, therefore, may reflect differences in the core demographics of particular publications rather than a societal shift. Also, since her surveys are given exclusively to women, she has no way of establishing whether this unease and dissatisfaction is specifically the condition of women or rather a reflection of widespread anxieties that transcend gender. In a later chapter, she references fears of nuclear apocalypse, the decline of public goods, a stifling culture of conformity, and an anti-intellectual rebelliousness among youth as phenomena that arise in the 1950s, but such issues are not addressed as significant contributors to “the problem that has no name.” Furthermore, Friedan’s focus on the experiences of alumni and students of an exclusive private college suggests that her analysis has little relevance to the experiences of women among the working poor and oppressed minorities. Finally, her analysis of statistics ignores major historical phenomena that could logically cause dramatic short-term changes without necessarily representing a fundamental shift in values. For instance, the GI Bill provided thousands of male veterans with the opportunity to become the first members of their families to attend college, causing an understandable dip in the relative proportion of women in college. Likewise, the end of a long period of economic hardship and war unsurprisingly resulted in a dramatic surge in rates of marriage and childbirth. This did not necessarily mean, as Friedan implies, that society was reducing women to baby factories.
While downplaying the significance of the Great Depression and WWII, Friedan identifies two major intellectual developments and a broadly defined marketing trend as major causes of women’s degradation in the post-war period. She devotes one chapter to a deconstruction of Freudian psychoanalysis, arguing that the Viennese therapist overstated the significance of sexual frustration and mistook women’s legitimate dissatisfaction with gender inequality as penis envy. As Freud’s ideas entered mass consciousness, according to Friedan, they promoted an image of feminists as psychologically maladjusted women who wanted to be men and really just needed a good lay. Friedan also condemns the work of Margaret Mead, arguing that the icon of cultural anthropology promoted notions of fixed and unchanging “functional” gender roles. In this way, Mead and other scholars provided ample intellectual ammunition to those who would argue that women seeking to perform “men’s work” were violating the natural order. Madison Avenue also inadvertently contributed to women’s subjugation, since, in Friedan’s reckoning, marketing strategies of the time period depended on bored and frustrated women seeking fulfillment and meaning through maximum consumption.
While Friedan’s observations provide insight into how gender roles are created and transformed in the public sphere, her analysis ignores relevant historical fact and makes illogical assumptions. Certainly, male chauvinists used the works of Freud and Mead to condemn feminism and belittle the gains of the suffragists. However, the idea that women had no business performing “male” economic and political roles was certainly not new to post-WWII U.S. society. In fact, many of the first wave feminists and suffragists whom Friedan champions so ardently framed their appeals within “functional” assumptions of a morally superior women’s sphere. As for the idea that marketers had a vested interest in keeping women trapped within disempowering housewife roles, subsequent history has shown that the expansion of household income accompanying women’s mass entry into the workforce was a tremendous boon to those who profit from the expansion of consumer culture. In fact, consumption has ballooned to such a degree that lifestyle maintenance for most middle-class families appears to depend on dual incomes.
If Friedan’s analysis of the marketing of consumer culture appears inadequate in light of subsequent developments, her comments about human sexuality are downright embarrassing. She suggests that frustration with proscribed gender roles caused women to focus an excessive and unnatural amount of energy on achieving sexual satisfaction. As a result, husbands suffering performance anxiety looked for less stressful sexual relations outside marriage, and frustrated wives looking for meaningless distraction did likewise. In Friedan’s laughably puritanical interpretation, no one seeks sex because they find genuine satisfaction in it, and all sex outside of marriage is pathological and childish. While rejecting Freud’s interpretation of the female psyche, she accepts without reservation the psychoanalytical view of male homosexuality as a form of narcissism resulting from an unhealthy fixation on the mother. Thus, she lays the “problem” of increasingly overt male homosexuality onto sexually frustrated mothers living through and seducing their sons. As the book unfolds, Friedan increasingly appears to discard any actual insight in favor of increasingly hysterical interpretations of every perceived social malady as resulting from the corrosive influence of the feminine mystique.
Finally, with the chapters “Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp” and “The Forfeited Self,” Friedan crosses the line into hyperbolic analogies that would be offensive if they were not so absurd. Housewifery is condemned as containing aspects “that make it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity” and those who aspire to housewifery “are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death [sic] in the concentration camps.” (305)
Looking back over 40 years after its publication, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique appears as a powerful polemic that likely played a significant role in inspiring the second wave of feminism. While a glass ceiling persists in many male-dominated fields, the huge numbers of women pursuing higher education and the virtual extinction of the full-time housewife demonstrate that on some levels Friedan’s agenda has triumphed. These developments represent an enormous social good, and Friedan is rightfully celebrated for her role in bringing them to fruition. However, this wonderful expansion of women’s human potential has not been the panacea that Friedan imagined. Divorce rates are significantly higher. Existential angst continues to pervade middle-class suburbia. Mass-market consumerism dominates the culture. Regarding sexuality, the American public appears more obsessed, neurotic, and confused than ever. Clearly, there is more to our society’s ills than the feminine mystique.
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LaFeber. Inevitable Revolutions. (book review) [Feb. 19th, 2007|07:07 pm]
LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Walter LaFeber takes the title for this book from John Kennedy’s famous assertion that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” President Kennedy made that statement as part of the rationale for the Alliance for Progress, his ambitious program to forestall Marxist takeovers in Latin America by promoting democratization and economic development. LaFeber interprets the Alliance as part of a long historical tradition in which U.S. policies, rhetorically promoting progressive and democratic goals for the region, actually furthered the interests of multinational corporations, entrenched elites, and oppressive military regimes. The result, LaFeber argues, is a widespread resentment of U.S. hegemony and the appearance in the late 1970s of Kennedy’s much-dreaded violent revolutions in Central America.
LaFeber begins his analysis by examining the development of Central American dependency in the 19th century. He observes that imperial ambitions and notions of racial superiority shaped the attitudes of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers toward their southern neighbors. The Monroe Doctrine is interpreted as much as a claim of hemispheric sphere of influence as an idealistic interest in securing Latin American liberty from European oppression. Recognizing their subordinate position, weak Central American states sought security in alliances with the U.S., but Yankee interest in the region throughout the mid-1800s was limited to filibustering and proposed canal building. During the Gilded Age James Blaine and other U.S. policy leaders saw in Central America opportunities to develop economically beneficial relationships without the disadvantageous trappings of formal empire. To accomplish this, however, the U.S. would have to provide the stability necessary to promote investor confidence.
The primary mechanism for ensuring that stability was Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Essentially, Roosevelt declared that the U.S. was prepared to intervene militarily whenever necessary to promote good governance and prosperity in the Caribbean region. According to LaFeber, the practical result of this policy in Central America was to ensure that U.S. commercial interests were protected regardless of the extent to which such businesses exploited the people and resources of weak states. LaFeber provides as an example Honduras, the prototypical banana republic. Beginning in the 1890s, North American entrepreneurs bought up large swathes of Honduran land and built private railroads to ensure easy access to ports. When a Honduran leader perceived as unfriendly to the banana magnates’ interests rose to power, the businessmen organized a counterrevolution to reinstall a more cooperative regime. The U.S. government intervened and positioned its representative as an honest broker, and the resulting “compromise” led to the election of the counterrevolutionary as the nation’s next president.
While this system effectively protected U.S.-based capital, it required a level of intervention that was problematic given the anti-imperialist rhetoric of many Washington politicians. To alleviate the need for U.S. boots on the ground every time revolutionary impulses arose from disaffected elements of Central American societies, the Marines in the 1920s began training local security forces. The idea was that these indigenous military units would provide stability and support for U.S.-friendly civilian democracies. However, as LaFeber argues, the practical result was that these well-trained militaries used their power to establish authoritarian dictatorships. A prominent example of this process, and one that would prove especially relevant for developments in the late 1970s, occurred in Nicaragua. U.S. Marines occupied the country from 1912 to 1933, and the major effort to disengage in 1926 was followed almost immediately by a civil war and reoccupation. When the U.S. finally withdrew, it left the nation in the hands of a civilian government safeguarded by a National Guard under the leadership of Anastasio Somoza. Somoza promptly killed off many of his potential rivals, including the popular guerilla leader Augusto Sandino, and forced the civilian president to step down. He then proceeded to establish a blatantly corrupt family dictatorship that siphoned off the nation’s wealth and brutally suppressed opposition for the next 40 years. Since Somoza was consistently agreeable to the economic and security interests of the U.S., Washington maintained a cordial relationship with the despotic family despite the deplorable impact of its misrule on the nation’s people. As an apocryphal statement famously attributed to Franklin Roosevelt candidly noted, “he [Anastasio Somoza] may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
As LaFeber’s narrative enters the Cold War era, his analysis presents the U.S.- Central America relationship as essentially more of the same, anticommunist rhetoric notwithstanding. The CIA-sponsored overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 followed many of the dynamics of interventions earlier in the century. Arbenz challenged the power of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company (UFCO) by nationalizing its unused lands and redistributing those lands to peasants. LaFeber stresses that while Arbenz was clearly a socialist his government was just as clearly not under the control of international communism. Thus, he argues, U.S. Ambassador Richard Patterson’s famous “duck test” was not useful for recognizing communism so much as for identifying resistance to U.S. economic hegemony. Disaffected Guatemalan elites, financed by the U.S. government and trained at bases on UFCO land in Honduras, toppled Arbenz and established an authoritarian dictatorship that practiced extraordinary violence in its suppression of the politicized peasantry.
LaFeber’s interpretation of U.S. policy in Central America has significant implications with regard to academic debates on the origins of the cold war. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. present the victors’ global policy options after World War II as a dichotomy between a Soviet preference for regional spheres of influence and the U.S. backing of an internationalism based on respect for every nation’s sovereignty. Schlesinger acknowledges that the U.S. was somewhat inconsistent in its advocacy for internationalism given its relationship with Latin America. However, he dismisses this neo-imperialism as an aberration rather than hypocrisy, and he places the main responsibility for the Cold War on ideological incompatibility rooted in Stalin’s madness, revolutionary zeal, and opportunistic totalitarianism. With LaFeber’s analysis in mind, however, Stalin’s insistence on the legitimacy of an exploitative Soviet sphere of influence over Eastern Europe seems entirely reasonable given that U.S. policy amounted to an exploitative sphere of influence over most of the Western hemisphere. Similarly, LaFeber’s description of military and economic coercion in Central America problematizes Geir Lundestad’s conception of U.S. Cold War policy as “empire by invitation.” Certainly, leaders such as Nicaragua’s Somozas welcomed U.S. penetration, but that invitation could not plausibly be said to extend from the Nicaraguan people.
The critical contradiction, LaFeber observes, lies between U.S. commitments to democracy and to capitalism. Democracy, in LaFeber’s conception, is often messy, unpredictable, and driven by the unwashed masses. Mainstream U.S. leaders tend to disapprove of that kind of democracy, manifested in U.S. history most notably in the protest culture of the late 1960s. That kind of democracy in Central America tends to lead to land reform, nationalization of key industries, high levels of taxation, and other policies that greatly distress the business class. In contrast, when U.S. leaders rapturously endorse democracy, they envision a stable system in which grievances are addressed through institutional processes in which the fundamental economic rules remain unchallenged. Given the options available in Central America, U.S. leaders often support authoritarian leaders who brutally suppress democracy while creating a stable investment environment for foreign capital. When U.S. presidents have pursued more idealistic goals in the region, the results have included rising expectations, declining acceptance of oppression, and increasing civil unrest.
LaFeber argues that Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress catastrophically tried to alter the rules of the game and set in motion situations leading to the violent revolutions that Kennedy sought to avoid. Kennedy’s pro-democracy rhetoric and commitments to the expansion of Latin American middle classes raised expectations and reduced acceptance of oppression. With inevitable budget crunches, subsequent U.S. administrations pursued the development agenda through the far cheaper and more traditional approach of funding entrenched elites and military governments. Middle classes, significant portions of the traditionally conservative Catholic Church, and politicized peasants united in opposition to U.S.-sponsored tyranny. Authoritarian leaders such as the Somozas responded violently to these challenges to their authority. U.S. leaders such as Jimmy Carter tried to walk a tightrope between encouraging respect for human rights and deterring the rise of Marxist revolutionaries. In the case of Nicaragua, the Marxists triumphed. In neighboring El Salvador, the U.S.-trained military maintained power through indiscriminate death squad violence. In both cases, the U.S. faced difficult situations in the early 1980s as democratic idealism clashed with the desire to maintain stable investment climates in the turbulent, poverty-stricken nations of Central America.
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Berube. Coming Out Under Fire. (review) [Feb. 12th, 2007|12:58 am]
Berube, Allan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: The Free Press, 1990.

Allan Berube’s Coming Out Under Fire offers a compelling account of the collective experiences of the thousands of gay men and hundreds of lesbians who became involved with the U.S. military during World War II. Using personal correspondence and extensive oral histories, Berube spotlights gays and lesbians, previously hidden from history, in every phase of military life from induction to combat to post-war readjustment. In addition, he places their experiences in the context of intense conflicts between psychiatrists and military officers over how best to design and implement a policy toward homosexuals. Berube argues is that, while the military’s policies were intensely discriminatory, the overall effect of gay participation in the World War II military effort was to promote gay self-awareness and to help develop amongst gays a greater sense of community.
One of the principle underlying currents for how the war changed gay life was a major change in the military’s policy toward homosexuality. Prior to this period, the armed forces punished the act of sodomy but had no policy toward homosexual persons as such. However, many soldiers who fought World War I were so traumatized that they required extensive hospitalization, and military planners believed that by filtering out homosexuals they could reduce the number of soldiers psychologically unfit for combat duty. One of the leading psychiatrists responsible for implementing the filtering program, Harry Sullivan, was a gay man himself, and in general the psychiatrists were sympathetic to those suffering from what was at the time diagnosed as a mental illness. Many military officers, on the other hand, viewed homosexual acts as a disgusting perversion and effeminate mannerisms as traits that could be transformed through training and discipline. As documented in psychiatric journals from the war era and military records recently declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, the nature of the policy vacillated as psychiatrists and officers jostled for control.
Attempts at screening out gay recruits affected them in varying ways. For many individuals who previously had suppressed their same-sex desires, the questioning suggested that there were other people like themselves out in the world and that they need not remain permanently isolated. With the surge in recruiting after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, both intake personnel and gay men had significant incentives to treat questions on same-sex desire as a formality rather than a substantive investigation. Fearing that malingerers would dodge the draft by falsely professing homosexuality, military officers deliberately amplified the social consequences of acknowledging same-sex desires. Those who admitted to being gay were excused from military duty, but they had to be prepared to explain to family members or potential employers why the label “sexual psychopath” was listed in non-confidential draft records. Such negative consequences, combined with the patriotic desire to serve their country, drove thousands of gay men to lie about their orientation in order to enter military service.
The situation for lesbians entering the service was somewhat different. World War II occasioned the creation of the first large-scale military units for women other than nurses. Unlike their male counterparts, lesbians faced a dynamic in which their gender transgressions were in many ways assets rather than liabilities. Recruiters struggling to attain ambitious enlistment quotas eagerly welcomed masculine women into the service. Berube documents how many women openly stated in their intake interviews that they were enlisting out of a desire to be close to other women or because of a preference to perform traditionally male work. Offered a chance to earn a respectable living in a same-sex environment in which masculine behavior was socially acceptable, many lesbians thrived in the military setting.
Berube documents a variety of ways that gay men, faced with a potentially more hostile work environment, adapted to military life. Some rigorously policed themselves to eliminate mannerisms and behaviors that others might view as gender inappropriate. Others found niches in entertainment, nursing, clerical work, and other noncombatant positions in which feminine traits were less likely to be cause for hostility. Berube walks a fine line with this material, as he strives to establish the merit of gays serving in these support positions while arguing that many gays also performed heroically in combat duty. Because he has so many soldier interviews from which to draw, he is largely successful in doing so. Nonetheless, the impression emerging from this material is that many gay soldiers were less psychologically suited to the brutality of war than were many of their straight colleagues. In the end, however, they performed their duties bravely and responsibly, earning the respect of comrades and commanding officers. Berube reports numerous cases in which officers in the field deliberately overlooked the blatant homosexuality of soldiers serving under them because they could not afford to lose such good men.
With regard to sexual activity, experiences also varied. Some gay men and lesbians maintained strict celibacy, but others took advantage of the numerous opportunities in the military for young people to enjoy one another’s company without supervision. While in most cases such activity occurred discreetly and without external consequence, the military still faced the problem of what to do with homosexuals “caught in the act.” Again, Berube documents a highly charged debate between psychiatrists and high-ranking military officers. As confessed homosexuals entered military hospitals for treatment, psychiatrists enthusiastically pursued previously unavailable research opportunities. Berube presents with disdain and mockery the experiments mounted in researchers’ unsuccessful efforts to establish physical differences between gays and straights, but he does credit them with beginning a rudimentary study of the sociology of gay culture. Unsurprisingly, some high-ranking officers loudly disapproved of military expenditures on such research and expressed a wish to return to the pre-World War II policy of arresting practicing homosexual soldiers for sodomy and issuing dishonorable discharges upon conviction. In a compromise that satisfied no one, the policy became that documented homosexuals were to be issued “blue” discharges, meaning that they were labeled unfit for duty despite the absence of criminal conduct. During the last two years of the war, military commanders launched what Berube characterizes as “witch hunts” to root out homosexuals in the ranks. Investigators badgered and humiliated suspected homosexuals during interrogation, held them in stockades for weeks or months at a time, and insisted that they provide the names of other homosexuals before granting them blue discharges.
Berube argues that wartime mobilization created a deeply significant social and political legacy for the gay and lesbian community. Many young people, away from familial and community controls for the first time, discovered a vast network of people with whom they shared not just sexual desire but an entire way of looking at the world. As a result, they were often discontent with returning to the smaller worlds from which they had come, and many relocated to what would become the first identifiably gay communities in cities such as San Francisco. Recipients of blue discharges, faced with the denial of veterans’ benefits, lobbied Congress on the grounds that the policy, which had also disproportionally removed blacks from the service, made them victims of discrimination. While they were unsuccessful in these efforts to change the law, they helped develop the idea that gays were a persecuted minority who needed to organize in order to protect their rights. Several former veterans were among those who in 1950 founded the Mattachine Society.
Coming Out Under Fire is an astonishing example of research and analysis by an amateur historian working on a topic that until recently would have been considered outside the realm of legitimate historical inquiry. Berube synthesizes a tremendous variety of oral histories, private letters, journal articles, medical records, and military documents into a well-organized structure that embraces complexity while still imparting a meaningful overarching narrative. Of course, he is interpreting the story as a gay man deeply attuned to the viewpoints of his gay subjects, so the book will likely disappoint the reader looking for a substantive discussion of, for instance, why military officers viewed homosexuality as a threat to military cohesion. However, the rich depth of understanding provided here would probably have been impossible from an historian making a pretense to objectivity on what is still today a deeply divisive topic. In many respects the book functions as a worthy prequel to John D’Emilio’s Sexual Communities, Sexual Politics, the foundational gay history monograph that traces the development of gay activism from the end of World War II to the Stonewall riots.
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Primary Source Analysis "Petition of Women of the 3rd Estate" [Feb. 7th, 2007|01:40 pm]
Primary source analysis- “Petition of Women of the Third Estate to the King, 1st January 1789”

As demonstrated in this document, the women of the Third Estate have two distinct but interrelated goals. First and foremost, they are interested in promoting their collective economic survival during a time of intense social and political volatility. To secure this objective, they seek a royal decree upholding the separate women’s economic sphere and preventing men from encroaching upon it. In addition, these women appear deeply concerned about their rank status within French society. They request that prostitutes be marked such that the respectable women of the Third Estate should not be mistaken for them, and they advocate for free schools so that women of their station can become literate in the French language. In pursuit of such aims, they employ a variety of rhetorical strategies. They emphasize the sorrow and hardship faced by women such as themselves in their present state of ignorance and poverty. They lay claim to a positive morality that will uplift France and resolve social ills. Finally, they declare most emphatically that they will not seek knowledge and skills that would challenge the world of male power and privilege. At a time when calls for radical change were sweeping across the nation, these women sought conservative reforms that reaffirmed the status quo and their position in it.
The women of the Third Estate do not believe that they stand to benefit from revolutionary change. A significant portion of their hardship stems from the entry of men into trades previously the exclusive province of women. The falling apart of gender roles, whether as a result of industrialization or poverty or shifting demographics, is a phenomena these women may well have associated with the revolutionary forces tearing away at the country as a whole. These women express that they do not see opportunity for desirable outcomes coming out of the political reform movement, either, implying that the presence of corrupting forces within the national assemblies “impede the freedom of the votes.” (18) The placement of this discussion of the Estates General near the beginning of the petition appears significant. The wording suggests that these women may well have considered that petitioning the assemblies was the best approach for addressing their grievances, and perhaps they were disappointed in the results of such an effort. Having been so spurned by the reformers, they would then necessarily seek the support of the king. Another possibility, and one more transparently supported in the text, is that they felt the need to reject alternative institutions of power in deference to the supreme authority of the sovereign. In other words, they are self-consciously not suggesting to the king that he must make a calculated political decision to help them or else lose their loyalty. Rather, they position themselves as loyal subjects “not wishing to obtain anything except from your [the king’s] heart.” (18)
The central problem that these women seek to bring to the king’s attention is that of the relationship between economics and status. Women of their rank receive a basic education geared toward acquiring enough literacy to participate in basic religious rites. Otherwise, a woman’s learning is limited to the skills necessary to exercise the socially accepted trades. With men entering the feminine economic sphere and competing successfully, women face intense pressures to find other ways of supporting themselves. For those who manage to find a husband willing to accept them in their debased state, the life ahead is certain to be that of a poor homemaker and incompetent mother. The only other options are the nunnery and the brothel. Faced with such grim prospects, women cannot even rely on their families, since, as the petition notes, parents prioritize sons over daughters.
The authors of the petition take a position on prostitution that is decidedly two-faced. On the one hand, they frame prostitution as the almost inevitable result of the system in which women of their rank are stuck. Attractive, undereducated young women, they argue, are doomed to “become the prey of the first seducer, commit a first sin, come to Paris to bury their shame, end by losing it altogether, and die victims of licentious ways.” (19) Even women of “haughty soul” and “noble heart” might be “forced [by circumstances] to hire themselves out.” (19) While sympathetic with the plight of those driven to prostitution, the petitioners recoil at the notion of being mistaken for them. That those fallen from grace have the economic resources to afford attire comparable to that of their social and moral betters must surely have come as quite a shock. Hence, the respectable women of the Third Estate advocate that these debased women be required to bear a “mark of identification.”
While this draconian action is primarily driven by a need to reassert the social and moral hierarchy, it is also consistent with the larger program of addressing degeneracy and improving the nation. One aspect of this agenda is that by increasing the associated opportunity costs authorities have the power effectively to discourage women from ignoble pursuits. Corresponding to this suppression of vice are several proposals rooted in the promotion of virtue. Women’s trades, the petitioners argue, must once again become exclusively the province of women only. Furthermore, a bureaucracy should be created in order to ensure that women of good moral standing receive employment. Thus, those desperate women considering prostitution would have positive as well as negative inducements to pursue a more honorable living. In addition, the petitioners argue for the creation of “free schools where we could learn our language on the basis of principles and religion and ethics.” (20) Women possessing such a moral education and economic self-sufficiency would, the argument goes, “give our children a sound and reasonable education so as to make them subjects worthy of serving you [the king].” (20)
Education for women seems like a progressive demand in the context of the times, but the petitioners are adamant that they are not challenging traditional gender roles. In fact, they make clear their commitment to divisions of labor when they declare, “if we are left at least with the needle and the spindle, we promise never to handle the compass or the square.” (19) Furthermore, they explicitly reject “the petty applications [of learning] which attenuate their majesty” such as sciences that “serve only to inspire us with a stupid pride, lead us to pedantry, go against the desires of nature, [etc.] (20) With such statements these women place a clear division between the Enlightenment thinking that is inspiring challenges to royal authority and their own desires for an education that upholds traditional values. In fact, they frame their moral education as a potential bulwark against challenges to the rule of the king, arguing that “we are willing to leave valor and genius to men, but we…defy them to love you better than we.” (20)
Such comments tie together with rhetorical gestures near the beginning of the petition in which the women frame the petition not as a demand but rather as a personal appeal to their sovereign. The arguments they are making are tied to traditional concepts of virtue and deference. The world is changing, and both the king and the women of the Third Estate face challenges to their traditional status. These women adopt as their implied position that the king is not responsible in any way for the misfortunes that have befallen them. A logical extension of this position is that other forces within French society, such as the national assemblies and unruly men with no respect for tradition, are causing the troubles haunting both the king and the women. The women suggest solutions that, if successful, would restore a moral equilibrium that would include deference to the sovereign and a return to a more secure status for the women.
From this petition alone I perceive no way to glean the context in which these women made their calculations. Perhaps they genuinely believed that the righteous path included deference to their rank superiors. Faced with social upheaval, they sought comfort in the familiar and strived to recreate a status quo that was disappearing from French society. On the surface, that seems the most likely meaning of this particular document. However, there are other possible interpretations. Perhaps they made a calculated decision that the king was going to prevail and that they needed to establish their loyalties for the sorting out that was surely to come. Perhaps they had sought alliances with revolutionary elements in the society only to be spurned due to sexism or some status-based antagonism. Reading this document through the prisms of modernity, I would like to see evidence that these women were pragmatic proto-feminists seeking to enhance the opportunities available to women by taking advantage of openings created by the political turmoil. However, the document does not support such a reading. Most likely, these were conservative, harshly judgmental women obsessing over declining status and reacting against the revolutionary tide.
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Terkel. Hard Times (book review) [Jan. 30th, 2007|03:54 pm]
Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. New York: Pantheon, 1970.

Hard Times is a deceptively complex work. Studs Terkel’s collection of oral histories at first appears arranged haphazardly. Terkel interviews unskilled workers, teenagers, homemakers, labor activists, industrialists, politicians, journalists, criminals, artists, farmers, drifters, dreamers, and pragmatists. His subjects explore the Depression through filters of race, class, gender, age, place, and moral assumption. The individual stories are compelling, often downright harrowing, but the diversity of experiences described within them does not at first glance appear to allow for any deeper themes to emerge. Gradually, however, a thesis emerges from the mayhem. By placing the histories in a particular order and steering the subjects’ recollections through careful questioning, Terkel presents his interpretation of the Depression Era. Fundamental flaws in the economic system caused the stock market crash. The primary purpose of the New Deal was to save the capitalist system from the chaos and revolutionary potential it had created. Terkel is especially concerned about the conditions that cause revolution due to the turbulent nature of the times during which he was creating this book.
Indeed, Terkel begins with three oral histories that recall the bonus army, a phenomena that in 1970 must have seemed analogous to the hippie movement and protests against the Vietnam War. Significantly, Terkel’s first subject is not an actual World War I veteran hoping to secure a promised bonus but rather an unemployed younger man with nothing better to do. While acknowledging that the marchers represented a hazardous obstruction to the business of the nation’s capital, Terkel effectively editorializes by inserting an author’s note quoting President Hoover’s praise of the army’s heavy-handed suppression of the protestors (16). He follows this with an eyewitness account of the brutality from a “respectable” conservative source, and he concludes with a brief account of how ordinary Americans outside the Beltway came together to help the displaced veterans in their own communities. This sub-theme of Depression Era community spirit is developed throughout the book and frequently contrasted with the more self-interested attitudes of typical Americans in more recent times. Tying these issues back to concerns of his present, Terkel a few pages later places several short interviews with young people of the Vietnam generation commenting on how little they are aware of the Depression’s impact on their experience.
Working within this context of subtle interpretation and analogy, Terkel presents an astonishing variety of perspectives. Substantial sections address the extreme suffering and hardship of the masses of unemployed drifters, impoverished farmers, and families dependent on bread lines and soup kitchens for their survival. However, even among the desperate the experience was not entirely negative. One man describes how riding on the tops of trains and traveling from town to town was actually liberating. Remembering her youth, one woman expresses the feelings of empowerment she felt while waiting in lines for her family’s sustenance. Others, including Cesar Chavez, couch their suffering not in terms of poverty but rather in relation to the racial prejudice that manifested in different ways throughout the country. In reference to the African-American experience, multiple interviewees state that for their community the hard times of grinding poverty existed long before the stock market crash. It only became a Depression when it hit white people.
Other sections present the viewpoints of individuals who were able to take advantage of the opportunities available during the Depression. One of the most striking examples is William Benton, an advertising executive who later became a U.S. Senator. Benton argues that the Depression destroyed old business models and created an environment where companies were willing to listen to young men with new ways of doing business. One of Benton’s biggest success stories is the proliferation of Muzak, the habit-forming, vacuous “music not to be listened to.” (63) A very different example of a prosperous man of the times is Doc Graham, a philosophical, lingo-spewing, name-dropping violent criminal who nostalgically recalls the good old days when the federal government stayed out of law enforcement, local police would loan you a gun to commit a robbery, and any woman who let you buy her that second drink was making a commitment to “lay her frame down for you.” (187) By placing such men as these in broader contexts of people who display compassion and community spirit, Terkel establishes very clearly how he feels about such opportunistic individuals.
Profiteers and rogues aside, one sector that appeared poised to benefit from the Depression was the radicals. In many ways, their failure to foment revolution is the central story to which Terkel returns in various forms throughout the book. Multiple interviewees relate narratives of union struggles that painfully, through the determined efforts of the Communist Party, built a viable union movement. However, as Max Shachtman relates in an oral history that reads exactly like a history lesson, ideological dependence on the Soviet Union limited the ability of the Communists to form working coalitions and eventually discredited them in the eyes of the unions. The Socialists and Wobblies, diminished from their WWI-era peaks, also failed to take advantage of openings created by widespread dissatisfaction with this traumatic breakdown of the capitalist order. Numerous interviewees note how their own hard times had led them to identify with the plight of minorities in a society built on systemic racial inequality; however, these individual moments of insight do not appear to have translated into much organized political action.
From 1936 Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon to Wobbly activist Fred Thompson, dozens of interviewees acknowledge that Roosevelt’s New Deal dimmed the revolutionary fire and saved American capitalism. While the Thompson piece displays a more cynical view than that of, for instance, the several interviewees associated with FDR’s Brain Trust, Thompson’s analysis appears to be in many respects that of the author. Thompson argues that the FDR-supported Congress of Industrial Organizations mainstreamed unionism while detaching union leadership from the workers they supposedly represented. Relief efforts such as the Works Progress Administration provided a sense of purpose and a means of survival, effectively mitigating the need for radical change. Business-orientated commentators, also seemingly serving as mouthpieces for the author, observe that FDR’s actions saved the banking and insurance industries. A general consensus emerges over what happened, even as interviewees differ widely over what particular developments meant. For instance, several note that FDR Administration policy, always somewhat scattershot, shifted toward more socialism-minded experiments after 1936. Unsurprisingly, an industrialist and a social worker express very different opinions about such experiments. Historian Christopher Lasch, in yet another section that reads like author’s analysis, argues that, while socialism was never considered as a possible solution to the crisis, elites differed over how government should address the problems. Many recognized the need to provide relief to the suffering in order to stave off revolution; many of these same people welcomed labor as a junior partner who once within the system could be more easily controlled. Terkel presents a small number of interviews with some of those among the elite who bash the reform effort unreservedly, and in their own words these persons reveal themselves to be remarkably oblivious to suffering and injustice and their own place of privilege. One such example is silver spoon artist Jerome Zerbe, who speaks of the late-1960s black power movement as people who should be “stepped on like vermin” (192).
As the book winds down, Terkel repeatedly comes back to this theme of how the unease of the 1930s relates to the unease of the late 1960s. In a disturbing section, a successful business leader who lived his youth in the Depression extols the reforms of those days and declares that a new business model emerged in which management and labor share common interests and work cooperatively. His two sons contest this rose-colored vision bitterly- one is a draft dodger in Canada, the other a spokesman for a group of militant student radicals. Reading this section, I wonder if by the 1990s these two young men had become Yuppies incapable of conveying their compromised values to their cynical children.
Overall, Terkel’s Hard Times offers a compelling collective account of the Great Depression as lived experience, and it provides a well-supported and highly plausible interpretation of the New Deal. Furthermore, it makes relevant and interesting observations about cross-generational relationships and the ways that the recent past informs the present. I have some issues with Terkel’s tendency to ask leading questions, and at times I get the sense that the interviews may have been edited in ways to make particular interviewees appear more or less sympathetic. I am not sure what to make of the author’s use of interviewee statements as a means of expressing his own interpretations. It seems simultaneously very clever and highly disingenuous; I would need more information about how Terkel conducted and edited these interviews to make a final judgment. However, despite these methodological concerns, I enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of this darkest time in U.S. history.
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Research plan, proposed paper on gay activism SLC 1977 [Jan. 28th, 2007|06:25 pm]
Summary
In 1977 a series of controversial events facilitated an unprecedented surge in levels of gay activism in Salt Lake City. Using social movement theory with an emphasis on the work of Sidney Tarrow, I will attempt to explain how and why this happened. Significant factors include the emergence of a national antigay movement led by Anita Bryant, the vigorous campaign by LDS leadership to combat homosexuality within the Church’s ranks, and the arrival in Salt Lake City of gay liberationists unrestrained by connections to local LDS communities. My hypothesis is that, while a home-grown gay community was beginning to create a cultural space for itself by the mid-1970s, overt political and legal activism only became possible through the efforts of outsiders. These actions, in turn, emboldened larger numbers of gay Mormons to challenge religious authorities.

Research questions and strategies
What were the main events that occurred in Utah in 1977 and how did they affect the gay community?
What was the state of the gay community of the Wasatch Front prior to 1977?
Examine the archival materials collected by Ben Williams and Connell O’Donovan as well as the Jay Bell/Affirmation papers and gay newspaper archives in Special Collections. Supplement with oral histories of gay activists.

What were the policies and actions of the LDS Church, from the hierarchy down to the ward level, toward lesbians and gays?
Read secondary sources on various aspects of the history of Mormonism (Quinn, Mauss, and Bradley), primary sources including the writings and speeches of Spencer W. Kimball and Boyd K. Packer, various primary sources on the campaigns against homosexuality at BYU (available through Ben Williams and Connell O’Donovan), and various sources on the unique experiences and challenges of gay Mormons (Schow, Phillips). Supplement with oral histories.

What was going on nationally during this time and how did those national issues play out in Utah?
Read secondary sources on the history and politics of the gay movement (D’Emilio, Marotta) and primary source on the antigay movement (Bryant). Use archival materials from Williams. Use oral interviews with activists.

How does social movement theory apply to the efforts of the Utah gay community in 1977? Was it legitimately a social movement?
Read and apply Tarrow, Goldberg, and Engel.

Archives
Affirmation/Jay Bell Collection. In Special Collections at the Marriott Library. Includes pamphlets (such as Cloy Jenkins’ Prologue, a direct challenge to antigay teachings at BYU), periodicals, business records, and minutes of meetings of the gay Mormon support group founded in 1977.

LGBT Mormon Archives. Assembled and maintained by Connell O’Donovan. Includes a variety of materials gathered by Connell in the course of his own research.

Salt Lake City Gay Newspaper Archive (The Gayzette, The Salt Lick, The Open Door). Marriott Library. Includes all gay-oriented newspapers published in the city between 1975 and 1979.

Utah Stonewall Historical Society. Assembled and maintained by Ben Williams. Includes comprehensive gathering of references to gay issues in Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News as well as records from gay activist groups, taped interviews, and a wide variety of other materials.

Primary sources- published
Bryant, Anita. The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality. Old Tappan, NJ: Spire, 1977.

Kimball, Spencer W. The Miracle of Forgiveness. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1969.

Potential oral interviews
Bob Waldrop- gay activist, Metropolitan Community Church
Joe Redburn- bar owner and gay activist
Babs DeLay- editor of first local gay newspaper
Ron Hunt- gay activist, Utah Bear Association
Ken Kline- gay activist, University of Utah Gay Student Union

Secondary sources
Bradley, Martha Sonntag. Pedestals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005.

D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Engel, Stephen M. The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Marotta, Toby. The Politics of Homosexuality. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Mauss, Armand L. The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Phillips, Rick. Conservative Christian Identity and Same-Sex Orientation: The Case of Gay Mormons. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

Quinn, D. Michael. Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Schow, Ron, Wayne Schow, and Marybeth Raynes (eds.) Peculiar People: Mormons and Same-Sex Orientation. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1991.

Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Research plan
Note: The great variable in this process will be the oral histories. I have no guarantee that any of these people will be interested in speaking with me. Bob Waldrop has expressed a willingness to participate, but he is residing in Oklahoma City and has a very busy schedule. I have not yet received a response from any of the other individuals who make up my oral history wish list. My plan therefore is to design the project as if oral histories were not involved, even though I know that it will be a much, much stronger paper with these individuals’ participation.

Week One- Read and take notes on all published sources pertaining to LDS history.
Week Two- Read and take notes on all published sources pertaining to social movements, the gay rights movements, and their opponents.
Weeks Three and Four- Read and take notes on the Gay Newspaper Archive, the Affirmation/Jay Bell papers, chronologies provided by Ben Williams, all materials available through the affirmation.org web site, and all online materials collected by Connell O’Donovan.
Week Five- Review and arrange notes. Think about what conclusions can be derived based on these notes and start thinking about how to structure the paper.
Weeks Six through Eight- Start writing. Write a minimum of two pages each day not engaged in obligations for other classes (in other words, every day Friday-Monday) for a total of eight pages minimum per week.
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Allen. Only Yesterday. [Jan. 23rd, 2007|04:06 pm]
Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931.

Only Yesterday is an enormously successful piece of popular history that combines anecdotes, cultural analysis, and historical synthesis to tell the story of . What makes this accomplishment truly distinctive is that Allen wrote it while the events that he was examining were still very recent history. In certain respects, this creates jarring holes in an analysis that cannot anticipate how subsequent events amplified or negated trends begun during this period. The work is also limited by the subject position of its white male liberal New Yorker author. However, these issues do not detract from the work’s primary strengths- its engaging and witty prose, its linkage of popular culture to political and economic history, and its assimilation of innumerable narrative strands into a coherent whole.
Allen begins his story in the immediate aftermath of World War I. First, he follows the sad and pathetic story of Woodrow Wilson and the failed attempt to enact the Fourteen Points and build a viable League of Nations. Allen’s analysis presents Wilson as if the President were a fatally flawed hero in a classical tragedy. Despite his noble idealism, Wilson was too stubborn and inflexible to negotiate successfully in Versailles or maneuver around Henry Cabot Lodge’s efforts to scuttle the treaty in Congress. Wilson was so determined in his futile quest that he destroyed himself physically and lived out his few remaining years as a shell of his former self.
Because Wilson was focused on the internationalist project, he neglected the volatile postwar domestic setting. Allen argues that the nation was still psychologically on a war footing after the armistice and that this, along with Wilson’s neglect, contributes to the intense hysteria of the Red Scare. Allen emphasizes that while there were a few violent and dangerous radicals posing a threat to public safety, the perceived danger of imminent Bolshevik revolution was entirely unsubstantiated. As a result, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had free reign for wholesale violations of civil rights and mass deportations. Allen sees the 1919 race riots and the nationwide rejuvenation of the Ku Klux Klan as extensions of this culture of intolerance.
What eventually mediated against this nationwide hostility and paranoia was, in Allen’s view, the rise of mass popular culture focused on trivial and frivolous distraction. Multimillion-dollar boxing matches, bathing suit contests, and scandalous murder trials dominated the public’s attention. These trends accelerated throughout the decade, culminating in the virtual worship of a mild-mannered, modestly successful stunt flyer. This is where Allen’s analysis appears most effectively to capture the spirit of the times, as he recognizes within the Lindbergh obsession a deep longing by the American for something genuine and noble in a society that was increasingly marketing-driven and contrived.
Allen’s other astute cultural observations revolve around changing manners and moral values, especially among young women. He observes that success for women’s suffrage had relatively little effect on politics but, in combination with the development of time-saving appliances and consumer service industries, appears to have detached women from their idealized Victorian role as matronly homemakers. Instead, young women embraced knee-length skirts, cosmetics, and far more open attitudes about sexuality. Women’s consumption of alcohol, previously the exclusive province of degenerate masculinity, demonstrated and accelerated the changing ideals of womanhood during this period.
The widespread consumption of alcohol by both sexes in the Prohibition era highlights another of Allen’s recurring themes- corruption more intense and volatile than in any previous period of U.S. history. Prohibition turned thousands of previously law-abiding citizens into criminals and allowed professional criminals opportunities for previously unimaginable profits and incentives for previously unseen levels of bribery and violence. At the pinnacle of government and economics, Allen examines the death of President Warren Harding and finds entirely plausible the notion that the sitting President may have committed suicide or been murdered. Shortly after his death the public became aware that highly placed persons within the Harding Administration, including several close personal friends of the deceased, were guilty of widespread nepotism including the receipt of huge bribes. Whereas Allen frames the failure of President Wilson as a great tragedy, he sees the debacles of the Harding presidency as the largely inevitable result of a political society that values the amiable personality of a Harding over intellectual and moral substance. Allen sees this trend of executive mediocrity continuing through the rest of the decade.
Allen’s later chapters focus on the events that brought the era to an end. He examines the Great Bull Market of 1928-29, the entry of the U.S. masses into the market by way of marginal purchases, and the disastrous events of late October 1929. Since historians in subsequent years have examined this period exhaustively, Allen’s analysis and anecdotes in this section are less illuminating than in other parts of the book. Nonetheless, he does an excellent job of evoking both the irrational exuberance of the bubble and the frantic desperation of the bubble burst. Allen concludes his book with the recognition that the stock market crash and subsequent developments rapidly diminished the nation’s appetite for spectacle and audacity. An era was ended.
Only Yesterday provides compelling examples of both the pitfalls and the benefits of writing history so soon after the fact. Allen’s analysis of Chicago gangster violence would no doubt have been significantly different had he known that Al Capone would be incarcerated for tax evasion later in 1931. While Allen recognizes that Prohibition has been counterproductive and faces calls for reform, he fails to anticipate that the constitutional ban will be repealed that same year. His opinion of the naval treaty between the U.S., Britain, and Japan might have been a good deal more negative had he known that the Rising Sun would invade Manchuria, also in 1931. Finally, his judgment of the economic meltdown that became the Great Depression would likely have been far less sympathetic of Hoover had he borne witness to the fiasco of the bonus army, the inadequacy of voluntarism, and the subsequent leadership of Franklin Roosevelt. On the other hand, Only Yesterday provides a strong sense of what history was actually like as experienced by the people who were living at the time. The book is full of revealing details, especially with regard to social and cultural history, that provide an exceptionally rich account for such a relatively brief work. Furthermore, since the language of the text is accessible to the non-academic reader, there were undoubtedly many opportunities for contemporary readers to assess for themselves whether the book “got it right.” The fact that the book was a popular success suggests that at the very least Allen’s analysis corresponded to the experience of a significant sector of the reading public.
The biggest deficiency in the work, only partly justified by its extremely contemporary nature, is the inability of the author to transcend his subject position. Allen writes extensively about the changing outfits and external behaviors of American women, but he provides little insight into changes in women’s thinking. By recent standards, much of his commentary on these matters appears superficial, glib, and at times outright condescending. He writes sympathetically about the injustices facing African Americans, but he never attempts to present their point of view. Furthermore, the entire African-American experience in the era is reduced to a one-page discussion of the Chicago riot. The lynching of WWI veterans, Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance, and jazz are all conspicuously absent. Other ethnic minorities are entirely invisible in Allen’s America. He writes about the Red Scare without considering the perspective of the radicals, and he examines systemic union corruption without addressing the position of the working class. Conducting his research mostly in the New York City library, he neglects America west of the Mississippi River, and the struggles of farmers are only mentioned in passing.
Thus, Only Yesterday is certainly not the definitive story of the Roaring Twenties. While a pioneering work in social and cultural history, it mistakes the society and culture of middle and upper class urban white males as that of the nation as a whole. However, with these limitations acknowledged, the book provides a vivid portrait of the historical moment as a particularly visible segment of the American public experienced it psychologically and materially.
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Andriote comparative essay version #2 [Dec. 15th, 2006|11:10 pm]
Andriote, John-Manuel. Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kramer, Larry. Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Schulman, Sarah. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Vaid, Urvashi. Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.

As journalist John-Manuel Andriote notes in the subtitle to Victory Deferred, AIDS changed gay life in America. In the most immediate sense, AIDS in the 1980s was a horrific disaster that obliterated a generation of gay men and left indelible emotional scars on those left behind. Despite the scorn and shame that plagued those suffering the disease in the early years, AIDS led to a greater visibility for gays, mainly due to the large numbers of closeted men forced to “come out” because they were dying. Eventually, AIDS inspired a political revolution within the gay community, as determined activists built up a movement to demand that government and business sectors behave responsively and responsibly to help those with the disease in their fight to live. Combined with a politically astute lobbying effort, this gay movement succeeded in increasing access to promising drugs and forcing Congress to approve hundreds of millions of dollars for AIDS-related services. However, success in acquiring funding did not lead either to a cure for AIDS or a significantly more powerful gay right’s movement. The 1990s brought increased visibility for gays but little solid progress toward genuine political and social equality. Increased representation in the media often upheld stereotypes and suggested a fantasy gay life in which homophobia was non-existent. The AIDS crisis itself was becoming a commodity undergoing repackaging to make it safe for consumption by straights.
Andriote’s Victory Deferred provides the starting point from which I will explore in this essay the transformation of gay politics and culture as a result of the AIDS epidemic. In addition to Andriote, I will examine the writings of three activists who express a variety of concerns regarding the social and political legacy of AIDS. Larry Kramer provides powerful articles and speeches from pivotal moments in the plague years along with extensive commentary providing personal and historical context. He ultimately concludes that the gay community’s sluggish response to the disease makes it in some sense responsible for the damage done. Urvashi Vaid argues that by the mid-1990s the gay rights movement had become stagnant and ineffective. Sarah Schulman looks at representations of gay identity and culture in mass media and suggests that the 1990s were a time of appropriation, commodification, and sanitization of gay experience for straight and gay consumption.
The title Victory Deferred refers to two wars being waged by the gay community, one against homophobia and one against AIDS. The book is primarily concerned with the latter conflict, though the former is ever-present as a barrier and a burden. Andriote begins his narrative in the late 1970s. He argues that he post-Stonewall gay liberation movement had largely subsided, and only in San Francisco could a politically significant gay community be said to exist. The national movement consisted of one lobbyist in Washington. The overwhelming majority of gay men were thoroughly apolitical, content to express their gay identities through promiscuous sexual activity in the context of a party and bathhouse culture. Lesbians continued to uphold a radical feminist ideal, but they also operated largely within insular communities with limited exposure to the larger homophobic world.
When the plague appeared in 1981, the gay community’s isolation proved a major barrier to providing PWAs (people with AIDS) with the help they needed. Outside of San Francisco, politicians considered the disease to be a gay problem and thus not a situation they needed to address. Denying the holocaust before them, fearful gays shunned PWAs. Since so few others were willing to help, those stricken with the disease operated many of the earliest service programs to meet their needs and boost awareness of the disease. As increasing numbers of gay men overcame their fears and assumed responsibility for their peers, they founded ASOs (AIDS service organizations) such as GMHC. However, the scale of the disaster was overwhelming. A small number of treatments finally became available in 1987, but they were prohibitively expensive and highly toxic. Furthermore, elaborate testing protocols and the labyrinthine FDA approval process held up the release of other drugs that potentially offered hope to PWAs.
Outraged by the apparent indifference toward this suffering by pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, Larry Kramer and a younger generation of gays founded ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). ACT UP launched dramatic media-savvy protests that facilitated the development of new medical protocols and a streamlined FDA approval process. Simultaneously, gay lobbyists pressured Congress to approve the Ryan White CARE Act, a comprehensive program to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for AIDS-related services. However, this success contributed to divisions within the movement. As medically savvy gay activists increasingly developing productive relationships with the drug industry and the government, they rejected the guerilla tactics of ACT UP. In numerous other ways Andriote presents the 1990s as a decade of hope and progress complicated by various problems within the movement, including class- and race-based divisions, resurgence in unsafe promiscuous sex, and woefully inefficient ASOs. Despite recognition of ongoing difficulties and the lack of a cure for AIDS, Andriote concludes Victory Deferred with a chapter that reads like an elegy for those who were lost in the course of a war that is nearly won. Each of the three remaining books in this study present far more pessimistic views.
Larry Kramer expresses a deep sense of cynicism and rage in Reports from the Holocaust, his extensively annotated collection of speeches and articles from the first seven years of the AIDS epidemic. Kramer is the single most influential gay activist of the 1980s, having founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the first significant ASO in New York City. He also started ACT UP, the foremost direct action protest group. By his own acknowledgement, Kramer is a polemicist, and many of the passages in Reports suffer from an excess of hyperbole. However, his anger is justified by the reality that hundreds of his friends and acquaintances were dying at a time when neither the institutions of government nor much of the gay community were taking necessary action. At the beginning of the AIDS crisis Kramer was already a pariah among a large sector of the New York gay elite due to his criticism of the culture of promiscuous indulgence in his 1978 novel Faggots. Even though he co-founded and served as de facto spokesman for GMHC, he quickly became alienated from others in the group who disapproved of his blunt assertions that the city’s gays needed to become less sexually active and more politically engaged.
Shortly before his departure from GMHC in 1983, Kramer wrote a piece called “1,112 and Counting” for the local gay newspaper. It opens as follows: “If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.” (Kramer, 33) Four years later, with the number of AIDS cases having risen to over 30,000, Kramer used the same words in the speech that led to the creation of ACT UP. With its young radicals committed to direct action, ACT UP truly represented the ideals of its founder. Unsurprisingly, however, Kramer found that he did not long have a place in this organization in which “everyone is very opinionated, and very angry.” (Kramer, 138) The rest of the articles in the book consist primarily of Kramer railing against whichever party he feels at the time is not meeting their responsibilities to address the AIDS crisis, whether it be National Institute of Health director Anthony Fauci, New York City mayor Mario Cuomo, or Max Frankel of the New York Times.
Kramer closes the book with a disturbing essay that explicitly compares his experiences with those of Jews during the Holocaust. In particular he addresses the troubling question posed by Hannah Arendt, who wondered about the complicity of Jews in their own undoing. Kramer sees the large numbers of gays who continue to live the lie of the closet, and he sees complicity. He declares that “I don’t believe that we made AIDS, but I believe, by our not rising up in any coherent, cohesive, visible way, we allow it to continue.” (Kramer, 262) While Kramer clearly is indicting himself as part of this massive moral failure, the subtext appears to be that those most responsible are gays seeking to live a lifestyle rather than embrace a cultural identity or a political program.
While Urvashi Vaid does not bear the psychic scars of AIDS as clearly as does Larry Kramer, she nonetheless expresses similar concerns about the future of the gay movement. Vaid, largely through her work in the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), has played a major role in bridging the gap between younger street activists and more professionalized actors in the gay rights movement. Writing in the mid-1990s, she suggests in Virtual Equality that the gay community has pursued a policy of mainstream assimilation whose natural consequence is the persistence of homophobia. The reason for this is that “civil rights can be won without displacing the moral and sexual hierarchy that enforces antigay stigmatization: you do not have to recognize the fundamental humanity of gay people in order to agree that they should be treated equally and fairly under the law.” (Vaid, 179) The ultimate example of such a policy, Vaid argues, is the “don’t ask don’t tell” compromise regarding gays in the military. While supposedly a progressive measure providing protection against persecution, the result of this policy is the perpetuation of a homophobic environment. People do not learn to tolerate and respect difference by pretending that it does not exist. Vaid does not reject the rights-based legalistic approach, but she argues that it must be accompanied by strategies that seek to address social and cultural attitudes toward gays and lesbians.
Like Kramer, Vaid sees the lack of sustained participation as a major barrier that conspires against gays organizing an effective social movement. The AIDS crisis brought thousands of frightened gay men and their friends into political organizations, but as improved drug regimes and extensive federal funding reduced the fear of AIDS many of these situational activists returned to their apolitical lives. Similarly, strong action by Christian conservatives that threatens the economic and civil status of gays results in a temporary boost to activist networks’ membership lists. Vaid argues that merely responding to crises rather than maintaining a proactive movement will never provide gays and lesbians with the political and cultural clout needed to attain genuine equality. Vaid espouses the development of activist alliances with groups who face persecution or violence on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. This would benefit the gay community in that “it would involve us in educating people who are unfamiliar with us, or threatened by us, on the common problems we face as members of the same community.” (Vaid, 208) How the apolitical gay masses are to be drawn into such a project remains unclear.
Vaid identifies two other trends that work against the development of a successful and proactive gay rights and liberation movement. The first is the Christian conservative movement, which Vaid labels the “Supremacist Right.” This movement enjoys both well-funded professional lobbyists and a highly mobilized grassroots base. While too radical to attain formal political power, organizations such as the Christian Coalition have successfully used voter initiatives to restrict gay rights while fighting to frame the issues in such a way as to claim a moral high ground. The other challenge is the culture of personal attack that any potential gay leader has to accept as the price of leadership. Divisions within leadership, Vaid contends, are inevitable in light of the variety of strategies and ideologies represented in the movement. However, the environment among gay leadership and the people they claim to represent is particularly harsh and personally disrespectful, possibly as a result of the lingering internalization of feelings of inferiority. As with several other issues addressed by Vaid, this is not a problem unique to the gay movement.
Whereas Vaid criticizes mainstream assimilation on the grounds that it promotes institutionalized homophobia, Sarah Schulman considers the same issues as they play out in relation to cultural authenticity and the commodification of homosexuality. Schulman was one of the first organizers in ACT UP and, when political shifts led to the departure of many gay men from the radical movement, she co-founded the Lesbian Avengers. In Stagestruck, an unusual combination of biography, literary analysis, and social commentary, Schulman tells the story of how the plot of her novel People in Trouble was folded into the smash Broadway musical Rent. Surprisingly, Schulman does not appear particularly upset with the fact that she has not received compensation from the multibillion-dollar Rent industry. Instead, Schulman rages that Rent creator Jonathan Larson altered her story to make it less about the experience of struggling working class gay PWAs and thus more appealing to a mainstream audience. In People in Trouble all the major characters are gay men or lesbians and the plot prominently features the themes of class-consciousness and homosexual identity. Rent tells the story of a heterosexual protagonist living in an idealized East Village bohemia absent divisions based on class, race, gender, or sexuality. Larson reduces gays and lesbians to the role of disposable sidekicks and narrative foils, and their suffering from AIDS, the central point of the story, thus is rendered innocuous.
Schulman identifies this gentrification of her story as part of a larger trend in which a stereotypical and unthreatening fake homosexuality supplants authentic expressions of gay culture and life. Another prominent example is Philadelphia, the 1992 Tom Hanks Oscar vehicle in which Hanks plays a gay lawyer dying of AIDS. This gay lawyer, who apparently has never heard of Lambda Legal Defense, has to seek council from a blatantly homophobic straight lawyer who must heroically overcome his disgust to represent his soon-to-be-deceased client. The straight lawyer is the audience stand-in and the hero. Schulman argues that “we are in a very tender moment when society is making a transition in its understanding of AIDS from lived experience to packaged image.” (Schulman, 146) Schulman recognizes that commercial forces are robbing the gay community of the collective memory of neglect, suffering, and courage that powered groups like ACT UP.
What Schulman finds most abhorrent is the degree to which such empty substitutes are marketed to lesbians and gays who are so desperate for any representation of themselves that “it is very seductive for gay people to confuse the presence of limited gay images in advertising with some kind of social equity, but it is entirely illusory.” (Schulman, 143) Schulman sees a disturbing trend as the national gay press becomes increasingly insubstantial and non-confrontational as AIDS treatments become more successful. At the same time, new publications geared specifically to PWAs package the disease as a lifestyle with its own sets of commodified products and experiences.
While Schulman clearly does not view the commodification of gay culture as progress, mainstream assimilationist gays may very well see the issue differently. Despite the efforts of gay intellectuals to articulate an identity that transcends same-sex physical attraction, the movement has remained fractured between gay ideals of left-leaning liberation and apolitical self-interest. This conflict of values within the movement can be traced at least as far back as 1953, when assimilationists forced Harry Hay to step away from the Mattachine Society. It appears again in the early 1970s, as the post-Stonewall liberation spirit slowly faded into the sexual liberation of the pre-AIDS era. A similar dynamic appears to have occurred in the early 1990s, as the “respectable” gay community largely rejected the radical tactics of ACT UP. Given the different kinds of competing forces within the gay community at each of these historical moments, declarations of repeating patterns must be made very tentatively. However, the basic dynamic appears to be that in moments of crisis a radical impulse that is always present within the movement temporarily takes precedence over the more conservative, privacy-oriented institutions that generally dominate gay life in America. Once the crisis passes, the radicalism recedes back into the margins of the movement.
Despite these irregular cycles and the deeply felt pessimism that penetrates the analyses of all three activists reviewed in this essay, I believe that the overall trend in recent gay history is toward the expansion of political rights and cultural acceptance. The Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas showed that working within the legal system could produce positive results. Despite the determined efforts of the Christian right to suppress it, the gay marriage debate is significantly transforming straight notions of gay ideals. While many of the dynamics Schulman criticizes so astutely continue to hold sway in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, Brokeback Mountain and Queer as Folk do not ignore homophobia or decentralize gay characters like Rent and Philadelphia. These may not be the same forms of progress as activists such as Vaid and Schulman ideally hoped for in the 1990s, but they represent progress nonetheless. When Larry Kramer rails today against the drug use, promiscuity, and general narcissism that pervade gay youth culture, he sounds more like a cantankerous community elder than a genuine harbinger of doom. Perhaps in the future there will be another crisis, another historical moment that causes lesbians and gays to unite around a shared identity based on common experiences and ideals. However, the current movement appears to be toward a kind of gay liberation in the context of a profoundly heterogeneous community in which gay identity, while significant, is not the primary basis for political identity.
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D'Emilio comparative essay rewrite [Dec. 15th, 2006|05:11 pm]
Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004.

D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Hay, Harry. (ed., Will Roscoe). Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Stein, Marc. City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

In his foundational gay history Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, John D’Emilio examines the question of how an assertively public gay liberation movement developed following the June 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. D’Emilio discusses the homophile movement emerged in the context of increasingly overt persecution of gays and lesbians in the 1950s. While such early groups were unsuccessful at mobilizing the closeted gay masses, they provided information, affirmation, and networking opportunities. Inspired by the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the New Left, younger activists bristled at the assimilationist approach of cautiously conservative homophiles. In San Francisco, D’Emilio reports, bar culture and homophile activism had fused gradually throughout the 1960s into a politically potent activist community. On the east coast, however, a single event, the Stonewall riots, triggered a sudden and dramatic shift in participation and ideology of the gay movement.
D’Emilio provides an impressive framework for understanding the post-World War II birth of gay activism, and numerous works in the years since its publication have elaborated on themes and issues D’Emilio introduces. David Carter explores the Stonewall riots themselves and their immediate role in the birth of east coast gay liberation. Marc Stein develops a detailed case study of Philadelphia’s lesbian-gay relations in the context of community-building and political organizing, mainly in the pre-Stonewall years. Will Roscoe contextualizes the writings of Harry Hay, the founder of the first homophile organization and a quixotic figure of enduring influence in the gay movement. Each of these works brings a greater sense of complexity and humanity to its small piece of D’Emilio’s tapestry.
David Carter’s Stonewall relates the story of that fateful event in a narrative that focuses equally on the riots themselves and their impact on the gay community. Carter sets the stage by providing anecdotes from the pre-Stonewall lives of his interviewees, mostly gay activists along with one of the street kids who frequented the Stonewall. He discusses the increasingly aggressive efforts of the middle class homophile group Mattachine-New York to end police entrapment of homosexuals and fight discrimination in bars and restaurants. He also relates how the most active members of the movement became estranged from one another due to personal conflicts and debates over strategy. He examines the mafia figures who refitted a burnt out restaurant into a seedy and highly lucrative gay bar and dance hall. The Stonewall Inn was a dive, an at times literal cesspool where unsympathetic thugs took advantage of gays by overcharging for watered down drinks in an unsanitary, unsafe environment. However, at the time the vast majority of gays and lesbians dared not to hope for anything better.
Carter’s description of the riots themselves emphasizes contingency and the primary role played by the least respectable members of the gay community. In previous police raids of gay bars, the patrons, feeling embarrassment and shame, had quietly melted away. However, the homeless street kids who formed a significant portion of the Stonewall Inn’s clientele were unashamed and had nowhere else to go. Still, the gathering outside of the bar would likely have dissipated without violence if not for the example of a butch lesbian, identity unknown, who was being arrested for not wearing three pieces of gender appropriate clothing as required by law. Inspired by her furious struggle as police dragged her from the club entrance to the waiting paddy wagon, people in the crowd began throwing objects at the police. As the authorities retreated into the Stonewall, the enraged mob began an intense assault in which an uprooted parking meter became a battering ram and soda bottles filled with lighter fluid became Molotov cocktails. With the arrival of police reinforcements, the street hustlers and “flame queens” continued to mount an improvised resistance, singing and dancing in Rockettes-style chorus lines as riot police bore down upon them. Violent protests continued off and on for six nights.
The remaining chapters in Carter’s book detail the rapid development of gay activism in the year that followed the riots. Within a month a radical militant organization called the Gay Liberation Front had supplanted the homophile movement. Instead of the homophiles’ emphasis on the genteel and unthreatening face of “respectable” homosexuality, the new movement adopted the revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Panthers and the strident, overtly sexual display of lesbian and gay identity. Uncomfortable with the linkage of gay rights to other political causes, several prominent activists formed a second group called the Gay Activists Alliance to focus solely on gay issues. This new organization engaged in aggressive direct action to force city officials to address their concerns regarding police abuse and other issues of interest to homosexuals. Carter ends the book with several interviewees’ accounts of the first Christopher Street Liberation Day, in which thousands of lesbians, gays, and their supporters paraded from Greenwich Village to Central Park in commemoration of the riots and how they had transformed the gay community.
David Carter’s Stonewall upholds and elaborates upon D’Emilio’s thesis that the Stonewall riots energized and radicalized preexisting gay rights networks. The infrastructure for a more assertive movement was there, but the younger generation of activists needed a powerful catalyst to force aside the conservative leadership with its ideals of gradual, non-confrontational change. An incident in Philadelphia demonstrates the generational shift within the gay activist community that became apparent in the days immediately following the riots. Homophiles were marching at Independence Hall on July Fourth as part of an Annual Reminder protesting continuing discrimination. Intent on maintaining a respectable public image, organizers insisted that gays and lesbians marching at this event be held to a strict “gender correct” dress code and forbidden from any public display of affection. However, in the new post-Stonewall environment, some of the younger protestors spontaneously held hands. Veteran “militant” activist Frank Kameny of Mattachine-Washington insisted that they desist, but Craig Rodwell, who had been present at the riots and who went on to organize the parade commemorating their anniversary, vehemently argued with Kameny and insisted on holding hands with his lover while they marched. This simple act, in Carter’s interpretation, demonstrated how Stonewall had irrevocably changed what it meant to be a gay activist and that “never again would gay people agree to such a controlled demonstration.” (Carter, 217)
Among the many local gay histories that have emerged in recent years, Marc Stein’s City of Brotherly and Sisterly Loves stands out with its emphasis on the relationships between lesbians and gay men. Stein describes how in the 1950s lesbians and gays in Philadelphia developed bar-based public cultures and resisted police oppression. Stein’s treatment of this material is highly sensitive to race, class, and gender variations among lesbians and gays living in different parts of town and creating different cultural spaces. Working class establishments were more likely to cater to multiracial and cross-dressing clienteles. Bars geared toward “straight-looking” gay men did not generally welcome “butch” lesbians or drag queens. Some gay-oriented clubs entertained starkly different sets of patrons depending on time of day or day of the week. Beatniks, hipsters, and jazz enthusiasts mingled in alternative coffeehouse cultures where gender transgression and interracial mixing were generally accepted though the environment was not explicitly gay. In short, Stein argues that making generalizations about Philadelphia lesbian and gay life in the 1950s is impossible. However, the predominant visible image of homosexuality was the gay white male, most likely due to his higher level of disposable income and more overt public sexuality.
Within the homophile movement as it manifested in its earliest incarnations, lesbians and gays either formed separate organizations or one organization dominated by gay men. As the Mattachine Society first made inroads into Philadelphia in 1960, it evolved differently from elsewhere due to the emphasis on a heterosocial public image as a strategy for acquiring social respectability. Activist lesbians and gays adopted traditional gendered dress and behaviors whenever their activities brought them into public view. Their mainstream appearance and civil attitudes toward one another belied public stereotypes of homosexuals as antisocial, gender-transgressing misfits. This less confrontational approach received its first major challenge in 1964 with the publication of Drum, a magazine affiliated with the Philadelphia homophiles but adopting a more explicitly sexual and masculine tone. Prominent lesbians within the movement created a new Mattachine Philadelphia and engineered the expulsion of Drum’s publisher from the regional homophile organization. These Philadelphia lesbians occupied the same space as Carter describes Mattachine New York holding for gay men in the years immediately before Stonewall. They were militant activists who embraced the direct action of public and visible protest, but they disapproved of overt sexuality and gender transgression. They led a highly motivated and dignified social movement that was incapable of inspiring and leading gay liberation, though in Philadelphia the lesbian-led Homophile Action League (HAL) remained vital to the movement for a few years after Stonewall. The problem facing such intermediate homophile groups was that, while they excoriated the original assimilationists’ passivity, they were unable to look past their notions of middle class respectability to engage the diverse larger gay community. Stein observes that the radical groups that supplanted them were equally short-lived and that “the politics of militant respectability, which had been shaped in the pre-Stonewall world, lived on as the dominant tendency in the lesbian and gay activism, as it still does.” (Stein, 314) This observation marks a significant shift of emphasis in relation to D’Emilio and Carter, since it suggests not only that the homophiles were a necessary precursor to gay liberation but also that in certain respects their values are the ones that prevailed following that particularly turbulent time in U.S. history. In other words, middle class respectability has been the standard image of activist gay identity, flamboyant pride parades notwithstanding.
Nonetheless, Stein’s analysis of the three years following the Stonewall riots upholds the D’Emilio and Carter interpretation of gay activists rejecting homophile conformity to societal expectation and embracing radical politics. Again, what makes Stein’s work different is his emphasis on lesbian activism. While D’Emilio and Carter address the radical feminist movement only in passing, Stein devotes substantial attention to radical lesbians and their complex relationships with the National Organization of Women, the Black Panthers, and the Gay Liberation Front. The complex sets of social dynamics that played out in 1950s Philadelphia in the bars had reappeared in a highly contentious manner among the New Left political movements of the early 1970s. However, these cleavages and complexities did not change the overall progress for lesbian and gay rights during this period, and Stein brings his story to a close in 1972 with the first Philadelphia Gay Pride Day parade.
D’Emilio credits the rage manifested by the Stonewall riots, in the context of the radicalized political climate of the late 1960s, with generating the ideology of the gay liberation movement. However, D’Emilio also references the radical origins of the homophile movement in the person of Harry Hay, who in 1950 founded of the first Mattachine Society in Los Angeles. In Radically Gay, Hay disciple Will Roscoe presents Hay’s original writings and frames his mentor’s works as major intellectual contributions to a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities confronted by gays as a persecuted cultural minority. While acknowledging that D’Emilio’s work helped rescue Hay from historical obscurity, Roscoe argues that D’Emilio and other gay scholars have failed to appreciate the continuing significance of Hay’s ideas after his forced departure from Mattachine in 1953. Radically Gay thus serves as a primary documents collection, an intellectual biography, and a set of theoretical arguments on issues of enduring importance to the gay community.
The first original document in the book, Hay’s outline for “a service and welfare organization devoted to the protection and improvement of Society’s Androgynous Minority” (Hay, 63), presents a nuanced argument for the development of an assertive and responsible gay community. Hay recognized the value of the cultural minority thesis in proposing that “Androgynes” should “contribute to the general welfare of the community by making common cause with other minorities.” (Hay, 66) While Hay cannot be credited with originating this approach, as San Francisco poet Robert Duncan had published his similarly-themed essay The Homosexual in America six years earlier, the placement of this idea at the center of the social movement would have important implications for activists who came later. At the same time that Hay was framing issues with the language of human rights and cultural dignity, he also explicitly compared homosexuals to alcoholics, advocated the suppression of public homosexual conduct, and pledged to work to prevent homosexuality in minors. Hay was deeply concerned with the negative images of homosexuals prevalent in society and hoped that a respectable, self-improving community could emerge from the masses of suppressed and pathological individuals.
Following the purging of communists from Mattachine, Hay focused on his research into a useable past for homosexuals in the societal roles of Native American berdaches, Near Eastern eunuchs, and other gender-ambiguous figures in ancient cultures. As the 1960s progressed Hay became increasingly enthusiastic about the rise of the counterculture and increasingly critical of the failure of the homophile movement to make the movement appealing to younger activists. Changing sexual values profoundly altered Hay’s concept of what healthy gay culture looked like, and this change in attitude manifested in a burst of activism in late 1969 with the founding of the Los Angeles branch of the Gay Liberation Front. Hay was very much in the spirit of the times when he declared that “homosexuality is a perfectly natural state…that we enjoy our sexuality, without feelings of inferiority or guilt.” (Hay, 177) Roscoe emphasizes that Hay began developing these ideas earlier, but, similarly to Stein’s Philadelphia and unlike San Francisco, Hay’s Los Angeles did not become a hotbed of radical gay activism until after the Stonewall riots.
As noted by Stein, a resurgence of the assimilationist approach in the mid-1970s largely supplanted the radicalism of the immediate post-Stonewall era. As the urban gay ghettos became increasingly impersonal and commercialized, Hay relocated to the New Mexico desert and continued developing his ideas on gay culture, history, and spirituality. He formulated the concept of subject-subject relationships, wherein same-sex couples were able to see each other as equals and escape the disempowering gender positioning of heterosexual relationships. Because of this insight, Hay argued, gays were uniquely enabled in the battle against other subject-object dichotomies based on race or class. This conceptualization of gays as truly a separate people, combined with Hay’s increasingly mystical interpretation of gay roles in ancient cultures, led to the founding of the neo-pagan Radical Faerie movement. The Radical Faeries provided an outlet for older gays to be more assertive about their gay identities, disproved offensive stereotypes of “dirty old men”, and helped sustain a commitment to progressive ideals.
The strange journey of Harry Hay belies D’Emilio’s concept of a linear progression from isolated individuals to cautious homophiles to radical gay liberators. Instead, radicalism seems to weave in and out of gay history depending on the mood of the times, available political opportunities, and the personalities of individual activists. Hay’s research into the various incarnations of the “third gender” throughout world history represent a broader challenge to the idea of continuous progress and suggest an alternate interpretation of Stonewall and gay liberation as an attempt to restore recognition of a unique group’s valuable contributions to human society.
The publication of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities in 1983 was a defining moment in the development of gay history. John D’Emilio revealed the relationship between the homophile movement that emerged in the 1950s and the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. In the process, he provided a powerful framework for understanding post-World War II gay history, and historians in the two decades since have found rewarding opportunities for original research within D’Emilio’s framework. David Carter’s Stonewall provides an enthralling and exhaustively researched account of the central incident that radicalized the east coast gay community. Marc Stein’s City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves elaborates on continuity and change across the Stonewall divide in the city of Philadelphia through study of the complex race, class, and gender relations among the city’s lesbians and gays. Radically Gay provides deeper understanding of the radical origins of the homophile movement, places Harry Hay in a significant role in the Stonewall-era liberation movement, and argues for the continuing relevance of Hay’s ideas to contemporary gay issues. In the end, these propositions complicate but do not contradict D’Emilio’s thesis.
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