http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1866
Peter Drucker
[May 2010]
FROM ITS BEGINNING in the 1990s in the United States, a "queer"
activist current has gradually spread to other countries, including
in recent years in Western Europe. In decades when the prevailing
trend in LGBT movements has been to orient to legal reforms by
parliamentary means, queer activism has constituted a third wave of
sexual radicalism, [1] emphasizing visibility, difference, direct
action, refusal to assimilate to the dominant culture, and the
fluidity and diversity of sexual desire.
What are the social origins of queer? Does this current have a vision
whether implicit or explicit of sexual liberation, and if so,
what is it? What is its relationship to such emancipatory projects as
feminism, antiracism, global justice and socialism?
I come to these questions as a socialist, whose own socialist
activism and LGBT activism have been linked for 30 years. The year I
came out as a gay man, 1978, was also the year I became active on the
socialist left more specifically, the socialist-feminist left. The
two things were closely linked in my mind and in my life, and still
are. So the questions I bring to queer activism are very much the
questions of a socialist and feminist gay man.
They are also, for better or worse, the questions of an outsider.
Although I was active in ACT UP, the milieu from which the queer
current first emerged, in San Francisco and New York in the late
1980s and early 1990s, this current didn't exist in the Netherlands
when I moved here in 1993. In recent years, when a queer activist
current has emerged, I have related to it as a sympathetic observer
and occasional supporter, but not as a real participant.
I would like to emphasize that the questions I'm posing really are
questions. I don't claim to know the answers; I'm not sure anybody
has definitive answers yet. I think queer activists will have to come
up with the answers as their politics continue to evolve. My hope is
that asking the questions will help stimulate discussion on them
within the queer current.
Another point I'd like to stress is that my questions concern queer
activism, not the body of largely academic thought that's called
"queer theory." My impression is that queer activism emerged a few
years before the key works of queer theory were published. In later
years some queer activists have been influenced by queer theory; but
many queer activists are not particularly theoretically minded, and
those who are can be influenced by other approaches.
Queer theory is itself a complex, contradictory, evolving body of
thought, on which I don't have any claim to be an expert. I do think
there are criticisms to be made of queer theory, [2] but I don't
think they all necessarily apply to queer activism.
Although queer activism has emerged only recently in the Netherlands,
internationally it is almost 20 years old. The first queer group,
Queer Nation, was founded in New York in 1990. [3] In fact the first
wave of Queer Nation groups in the United States rose and receded
within a few years. Only a few groups, like OutRage! in London
(founded only a month after Queer Nation in New York) around its
controversial leader Peter Tatchell, have managed more or less to
survive through the intervening years. Some of the most active
queer-identified groups today are in Southern Europe, like the French
and Portuguese Pink Panthers, and have emerged only in the past decade.
Lack of organizational continuity makes the current hard to pin down.
Although there are various international queer events, like the
"queeruption" that took place annually from 1998 to 2007 in a
different country and city, the queer current is also very
decentralized, with no permanent national or international structures
or decision-making bodies.
Many queer activists define themselves as anarchists, leaning towards
the tendency within anarchism that is suspicious of organization; DIY
("do it yourself") is widely seen as a queer principle. This too
contributes to the difficulty in defining queer politics. Finally,
queer-identified activity sometimes raises the question of how
"politics" should be defined, since much of it consists of cultural
and sexual events that make little or no effort to reach
non-queer-identified people.
The shape of queer activism probably has something to do with its
social origins. Before discussing the strengths and limitations of
queer activism, therefore, I would like to analyze the emergence of
the queer scene more generally.
Fordist to Post-Fordist Gay Identities
The emergence of queer can be explained to a great extent in class
terms, I think, starting from John D'Emilio's analysis of the
emergence of gay identity under capitalism. [4] Roughly following his
analysis, I would argue that modern lesbian and gay communities are
largely a product of the development of capitalism in the 19th and
20th centuries, and on a mass scale particularly a product of the
long expansive wave of capitalism from 1945 to 1973.
It is by now nothing new to link the rise of what might be called
classic lesbian/gay identity to the rise of a "free" labor force
under capitalism. This has developed over the course of centuries,
and historians have generally looked at it as a long process. But gay
identity as we know it, particularly on a mass scale, is in fact
amazingly recent, more a question of decades than of centuries.
On closer examination the emergence, consolidation and spread of gay
identity took place to a large extent during what some Marxist
economists refer to as the expansive long wave of 1945-73. It emerged
gradually from the waves of political and social repression (in
Europe fascism and Stalinism; in the United States the aftermath of
Prohibition followed by McCarthyism) [5] that had begun with the
1930s depression. Gay identity was dependent on the growing
prosperity of the working and middle classes, catalysed by profound
cultural changes from the 1940s to the 1970s (from the upheavals of
the Second World War [6] to the mass radicalization of the New Left
years) that prosperity helped make possible.
This means that gay identity was shaped in many ways by the mode of
capitalist accumulation that some economists call "Fordism,"
specifically by mass consumer societies and welfare states. After
1945, working-class living standards in capitalist countries went up
dramatically under the Fordist order, in which increases in labor
productivity were matched to a large extent with increasing real
wages that sustained increasing effective demand, and many forms of
social insurance cushioned the blows that hit working people during
dips in the business cycle.
As a result, for the first time masses of working-class people as
well as students and others were able to live independently of their
families. Working-class family structures and gender roles also
changed. For the first time since the family wage became a cherished
ideal, and sometimes a reality, for broad working-class layers in the
mid- to late-19th century, World War II made waged work at least
temporarily normal for even respectable working-class and middle-class women.
This transformation made a dent in the pronounced gender polarization
that had been characteristic of both working-class heterosexuality
and homosexuality in the first decades of the 20th century. Higher
funding for education and expansion of a social safety net (in the
imperialist countries at least) decreased people's economic
dependence on parents to support them as students or young people, on
spouses to help pay the rent, and on children to save them from
poverty in old age. Rapid growth of service and leisure industries in
developed countries created more jobs, for men if not for women, in
which gender expectations were in some cases less rigid than in
blue-collar sectors.
The combination of increased economic possibilities and more
questioning of gender roles helped many more people in the 1950s and
'60s defy convention and form lesbian/gay couples and communities.
What remained to prevent people from living openly lesbian/gay lives
were the constraints of the law, police, employers, landlords, and so
on. The lesbian/gay movements of the 1960s and '70s rebelled against
these constraints, inspired by a wave of other social rebellions:
black, youth, antiwar, feminist, and (at least in some European
countries) working class.
The second wave of feminism was key in virtually finishing off (or at
least driving underground) the butch-femme patterns that were still
largely hegemonic in 1950s lesbian subcultures. The first lesbian/gay
legal victories in the 1970s made mass, open lesbian/gay communities
possible in the imperialist countries for the first time in history.
The conditions that initially shaped emerging lesbian/gay identities
did not last. The depressive long wave that began by 1974-75 was met
by the late 1970s with a neoliberal offensive. This offensive has
included (to be incredibly schematic): a shift to "Toyotist"
production techniques and to "lean production" generally; economic
globalization, liberalization and deregulation; an increase in the
wealth and power of capital at labor's expense; an increase in
inequality among countries (through the debt crisis and structural
adjustment policies) and within countries (through regressive tax and
welfare "reforms" and attacks on unions), and luxury consumption that
has increasingly replaced mass consumption as a motor of economic growth.
This offensive has among other things fragmented the world's working
classes. Big differences have grown up between better- and worse-paid
workers, permanent and temporary workers, native-born and immigrant,
employed and unemployed. The relatively greater homogeneity of
national working classes in the 1960s, which was the backdrop to the
rise of lesbian/gay identity, is a thing of the past.
Like the rise of Fordism, its decline has had implications for LGBT
identities, communities and politics. There is of course no
one-to-one correspondence between economic and social developments
and shifts in sexual, cultural and political identities. In
lesbian/gay communities, as in the world at large, there is a whole
set of institutions that produce (among other things) lesbian/gay
ideology and identity and mediate the underlying class and social
dynamics. But there are some trends that correspond to changing class
dynamics in lesbian/gay communities and are expressed in a shifting
relationship of forces within them.
On the one hand, commercial gay scenes and sexual identities
compatible with these scenes have advanced and been consolidated in
many parts of the world. Particularly among some middle-class and
upper-working-class social layers that prospered in the 1980s and
'90s, especially but not only in the imperialist countries,
commercial gay scenes continued to grow, continuing to undergird
lesbian/gay identity. [7]
Market-friendly lesbian/gay identities have prospered in
commercialized spaces, in the construction of two-income households
among better-off gays and to a lesser extent lesbians, and in the
tolerant public space fostered by gay rights victories. Many
relatively better paid lesbian/gay people who have benefited from
both economic success and gay rights reforms have some cause to be
contented with the progress they have made: "Inside a cozy
brownstone, curled up next to a health-insured domestic partner in
front of a Melissa Etheridge video on MTV, flipping through Out
magazine and sipping an Absolut and tonic, capitalism can feel pretty
good." [8]
The ideological and cultural sway of gay identities in LGBT
communities extends beyond the more privileged social layers in which
people's lives most comfortably fit these identities. In the
imperialist countries, despite the proliferation of websites and
zines defining identities and subcultures for minorities within the
minorities, the most widely circulated books, periodicals and videos
tend to be those most closely linked to the new, predominantly
middle-class gay mainstream. Even poor transgender and queer people,
whose lives are most remote from the images of the gay mainstream,
often incorporate aspects of gay mainstream culture into their
aspirations and fantasies.
Three aspects of the lesbian/gay identity that stabilized by the
early 1980s fit well with the increasingly conservative social
climate: the community's self-definition as a stable minority, its
increasing tendency towards gender conformity, and marginalization of
its own sexual minorities. A higher degree of gender conformity among
lesbian/gay people has fit with their incorporation into a neoliberal
social and sexual order.
Lesbians and gay men's self-definition as a minority group expressed
a profound social fact about lesbian/gay life as it took shape in the
1970s. To the extent that lesbians and gays were increasingly defined
as people who inhabited a certain community (went to certain bars,
bathhouses and discos, patronized certain businesses, and in the
United States at least even lived to some extent in certain
neighborhoods), they were more "ghettoized" than before, more clearly
demarcated from a majority defined as straight.
The tendency of many early theorists of lesbian/gay liberation to
question the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality,
emphasize the fluidity of sexual identity and speculate about
universal bisexuality tended to fade away with time as the
community's material reality became more sharp-edged. The lesbian/gay
rights movement accordingly ran less risk of seeming sexually
subversive of the broader sexual order.
The decline of butch/femme role-playing among lesbians and of camp
culture among gay men also contributed to normalizing lesbian/gay
identity. The drag queens who had played a leading role in the 1969
Stonewall rebellion found, as social tolerance of lesbians and gays
in general began to increase in the 1970s, that social tolerance for
gender nonconformity in many queer spaces if anything decreased. Drag
often seemed anomalous and even embarrassing in the context of
androgynous imagery that was in vogue in the early 1970s.
Despite growing levels of consciousness and self-expression among
transgender people, lesbian/gay communities increasingly defined
themselves in ways that placed transgender people and other visible
nonconformists on the margins if not completely out of bounds. The
decline of Fordism was accompanied early on by a shift among gay men
from the largely androgynous imagery of the early 1970s to the more
masculine "clone" culture that took hold by the early '80s. Feminine
forms of self-presentation that lesbian feminists once frowned on,
using the label "lipstick lesbians," had become more common and
acceptable by the 1990s. The Social Origins of Queer
Commercial scenes, however, have not been equally determinant for the
lifestyles or identities of all people with open same-sex
sexualities. In the dependent world many poor people simply have a
hard time taking part in commercial gay scenes. In the imperialist
countries, while commercial scenes are more accessible to even
lower-income queers, growing economic inequality has meant
increasingly divergent realities in lesbian and gay people's lives.
Criticism has mounted among LGBT people of the over-consumption
increasingly characteristic of many aspects of the commercial gay
scene, which inevitably marginalizes many LGBT people and alienates
many others.
Alternative scenes of various sorts (not always less commercial) have
proliferated, creating space for queer identities more or less
outside the mainstream commercial scene. Contrary to much right wing
anti-gay rhetoric, the prosperous couples focused on by glossy
lesbian/gay magazines were never typical of queers in general. Data
gathered by the U.S. National Opinion Research Center's General
Social Survey in the 1990s suggested that lesbian and bisexual women
were still far less likely than other women to have professional or
technical jobs and more likely to have service or craft/operative
jobs, while gay and bisexual men were more likely than other men to
have professional/technical, clerical/sales or service jobs but less
likely to have managerial jobs. [9]
Whatever the causes (less ability or willingness to meet gendered job
expectations, migration to more competitive job markets,
discrimination), the net result (contrary to unfounded claims made
not only by anti-gay ideologues but also by some gay publications)
was that at least in the United States, both gay men and lesbians
were and are underrepresented in the higher-income brackets (with
family incomes of $50,000 or more), while gay men in particular are
over-represented in the lower-income brackets (with family incomes of
$30,000 or less). Another set of data showed that after taking
differences in education, age and other factors into account, gay and
bisexual men earned 11-27% less than comparable straight men. [10]
The expansion of queer communities centred on gay commercial scenes
has not improved the situation of lower-income queers. Particularly
in imperialist countries like the United States and to a lesser
extent Britain, the welfare state has been shredded by Reaganism and
Thatcherism, unions have been very much weakened, and inequality has
grown rapidly. Economic inequality is presumably as characteristic of
LGBT communities as of the broader societies within which they exist.
Lower-income queers, transgender people, street youth and queer
people of color have been under assault in various ways, as attacks
on poor people and minorities have become more prominent in politics
and society generally in recent decades. Queers are also more likely
to be cut off from broader family support networks and, as the social
safety net has frayed, inequalities resulting from wage differentials
have affected queers with particular intensity.
A queer social milieu has grown up since the mid-1980s, made up to a
large extent of young people on the bottom of the unequal social
hourglass that resulted from economic restructuring. One aspect of
the underlying social reality is that the lower young queers' incomes
are and the more meager their job prospects, the less on average they
identify with or want to join the lesbian/gay community that has
grown up since the 1960s and '70s.
Particularly in English-speaking imperialist countries the ones
where social polarization first took flight in the 1980s young
queers resisted disco culture and a bar-centred ghetto. In some ways
English-speaking queer scenes have been echoed by queers in
squatters' milieus in continental Western Europe. This generation had
also grown up in far more diverse and changeable family structures,
which made the notion of modelling lesbian/gay households on
traditional straight ones all the more implausible for them.
Economic marginalization and cultural alienation were closely
interlinked in the emergence of a queer milieu, making it hard in
many cases to say to what extent poverty was a cause of alienation,
to what extent the choice for a queer lifestyle contributed to more
or less voluntary poverty, and to what extent some queers are
middle-class gays dressing and talking like down-and-outs. But the
correlation between lower incomes and queer self-identification seems
unmistakable.
As we have seen, the dominant trend during the 1980s and '90s, based
particularly on the reality of more prosperous lesbian/gay people's
lives, was for the lesbian/gay community to define itself as a stable
and distinct minority, tend increasingly towards gender conformity,
and marginalize its own sexual minorities. By contrast, the
nonconformist same-sex identities that have grown up among more
marginalized layers have tended to identify with broader communities
of oppressed or rebellious people and to resist dominant gender norms.
Queer identities defined by marginalization on the basis of age,
class, region and/or ethnicity overlap with the growth or persistence
of various subcultures that have been marginal in the commercial
scene because they constitute (sometimes extensive) niche markets at
best and illicit ones at worse. The relationship between queer
identities and marginalized sexual practices is elusive, but there
does appear to be some kind of correlation. There are of course many
queers who limit their sexual rebellion to the safety of a particular
brand of bar. But the more attached people are to their sexual
identities, the more reluctant many of them become to give them up at
work or in public.
Not coincidentally, the more visible transgender or leather people
are, the less likely they are to get one of the well-paid, permanent,
fulltime jobs that have become scarcer and more coveted commodities
in post-Fordist economies. Moreover some people are virtually or
entirely incapable of hiding aspects of their identities,
particularly effeminacy in men or butchness in women, that are often
rightly or wrongly associated with queer sexualities. Voluntary or
involuntary, tell-tale signs of sexual deviance often lead to
management's excluding people from professional or service jobs or to
fellow workers' hostility that impels people to avoid or flee certain
workplaces.
The result is not a straightforward correlation between queer
identity and working class affiliation; on the contrary,
working-class lesbians and gays have sometimes reacted against
self-defined queer groups when such groups demanded visibility of
them that would make their lives more difficult in particular
workplaces or communities. But there does seem to be a correlation
between queer identities and particular sectors of the working class
on average younger, less skilled, less organized and lower paid
that have expanded since the 1970s.
Part of the younger queer generation has taken up and to some extent
recast claims for stigmatized sexual practices that were made during
the sex wars of the early 1980s. For example, younger transgender
people seem more likely to take on gender identities that are
difficult to subsume at all under existing feminine or masculine
roles. These more flexible and ambiguous forms of transgender
associated with queer milieus contrast with the forms of
transsexuality promoted by a wing of the medical establishment.
Queer Politics and Its Limits
This account of the social roots of queer can help us understand
several positive aspects of queer politics as well as some of its
limitations. To begin with the positive aspects:
• Reflecting queer alienation from the ghettoized lesbian/gay
mainstream, queer politics is anti-assimilationalist, inclusive and
diverse. It refuses to fit into any model of gay or lesbian
respectability. It is a space where many of the LGBT people who are
least welcome in other LGBT spaces such as trans and intersexed
people, bisexuals and SM practitioners are welcome and visible.
Queer is not seen as a single way of being, but rather as a dissident
stance with great respect and room for difference.
• Queers do not have any of the access to the political power
structure that the lesbian/gay establishment has built up over the
years. So when they take political action, they do so militantly,
keeping up the tradition of direct action pioneered by ACT UP (and to
a great extent borrowed, though rarely acknowledged, by the global
justice movement). [11] They do not engage in the kind of lobbying
and parliamentary work that has come to predominate in mainstream
LGBT political groups, but instead use more confrontational and
creative tactics. Peter Tatchell's attempt to do a citizens' arrest
of homophobic Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was an
internationally notorious example. The early Queer Nation groups
applied these kinds of tactics at the most local level, for example
by highlighting the dictatorship of the heterosexual norm by holding
same-sex kiss-ins in non-gay bars and responding to homophobic
violence with the slogan "Queers bash back!" (though as far as I know
this remained at the level of a slogan). My impression though is that
there have been fewer such militant queer actions in recent years.
• Rejecting ghettoization, queers reaffirm the fluidity of sexual
desire and identity that was proclaimed by the pioneers of
lesbian/gay liberation in the 1960s and '70s what was then often
defined as a universal bisexual potential or an aspiration to
universal "polymorphous perversity" (a Freudian term picked up by
Herbert Marcuse). [12] Queers therefore reject the vision of lesbian
and gay people as a fixed, static minority of the population, which
some of the most moderate currents in lesbian/gay movements take as
the basis for their claim for equal rights ("we can't help it, we
were born this way, so it's not fair to discriminate against us and
not necessary to discriminate against us, since there won't be any
more of us if you tolerate us"). Queers also refuse to let their
sexual difference and visibility be confined to a gay ghetto,
insisting that the whole world should be as the expression goes
"queered," that is, opened up to queer possibilities.
• Reflecting the international character of the neoliberal offensive
that gave rise to the queer scene, queer politics is in principle
internationalist. The list of the 10 queeruption sites from 1998 to
2007 give a sense of the scope and limits of this internationalism,
however. Five of the 10 were in Europe, three in North America, one
in Australia and one in Israel. That is to say, they all took place
in the richest one-fifth of the world. Six of the 10 took place in
cities where the dominant language is English. This is in fact a
narrower geography than the geography of the open, visible LGBT
world; many Latin American countries have vibrant, visible LGBT
communities and movements, as do South Africa and several Asian countries.
• Like its internationalism, the geographical limits of queer are
probably no accident; they reflect the fact that sexual dissidence
takes very different forms in imperialist and dependent countries.
For example, the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004 showed that
thousands of India's transgender hijras identified with the global
justice movement's rebellion against neoliberalism, and were prepared
to resort to militant tactics similar to European and North American
queer activists'; but they did so on the basis of the subculture that
they had been developing over the course of decades or even centuries.
So what are the factors that make it harder for queer activists to
link up with many of the other rebellious LGBTs in the world, let
alone with labor, feminist and other movements?
The sexual conservatism of other social movements clearly makes it
difficult for queer activists to ally with them. In many countries
the labor and even feminist movements reflect the open heterosexism
of their societies. In other countries where open anti-LGBT prejudice
is less accepted, mainstream social movements often link up with
middle-class, moderate lesbian/gay organizations rather than with
radical groups.
This sexual conformism can dovetail with the political and social
moderation of mainstream leaderships. LGBT activists in broader
social movements sometimes adapt to those leaderships' moderation and
sexual conservatism; as noted above, working-class LGBTs, LGBTs of
color and other specially oppressed LGBTs sometimes feel obliged to
downplay their own sexualities in order to blend more easily into
broader communities. This makes many LGBTs hesitate to associate
themselves with queers. Moreover, in many cases queer groups simply
do not have the size or institutional weight to make them interesting
as allies for big social organizations.
There are other factors isolating queer activists that sometimes
reflect their own political limitations. For example:
• The anti-organizational, DIY leanings of some queer groups can
reinforce their social homogeneity. Spontaneous, informal styles of
action are easier to sustain when activists have roughly similar
backgrounds, lifestyles and social situations. When people need to
unite in action who face different forms of oppression and lead very
different lives, they need structures to help them discuss their
differences in depth, make joint decisions and carry out their
decisions over the longer term. More structures mean a greater risk
of bureaucracy and authoritarianism; but the way to minimize these
risks is to consciously make structures as grassroots and democratic
as possible, not to avoid structure altogether. [13]
• The social marginality that queer people experience sometimes seems
to lead queer activists to choose political marginality, cutting
themselves off from other LGBT people who might sympathize with queer
politics if they encountered it. For example, the commercialization
and depoliticization of lesbian/gay pride events help explain the
allergy that many queer activists seem to have to them; but staying
away from pride marches can deprive queer groups of access to a big
potential audience. Pride marches of hundreds of thousands of people
in several countries helped put the issue of same-sex marriage and
civil union on the political agenda.
• Again, many queer activists' allergy to the institution of marriage
and the assimilationism that the demand for access to it can reflect
may be understandable and even justified. But thousands of
working-class and poor LGBTs have very practical concerns that lead
them to demand equal access to marriage. Failing to address these
concerns is another way that some queer radicals may cut themselves
off from a potential base of support. [14]
• Queer political activism can flow almost imperceptibly into
subcultural events. This can be a source of strength, inasmuch as the
politics is rooted in the life of a community. But it can sometimes
lead queer activists to stress the aspects of LGBT identity that are
cultural and chosen, rather than those that are socially constructed
and involuntary. Many of the most oppressed LGBT people do not feel
that there's anything chosen about their identities. This is
reflected, for example, in the differences between queer-oriented
transgender people, who may say that they transcend gender, and more
traditional transgender people who strongly identify with a gender
different from the one they were assigned to as children. This is one
way in which queer activism sometimes takes on the suspicion of
identity practiced by queer theory. It is important to recognize that
an identity can be fluid and malleable and yet at the same time very
strong and stable and essential as the basis for a movement. The
emphasis on cultural rather than material aspects of identity may
also make queer politics less appealing to some LGBT blacks and
immigrants, who are more likely to contend with material oppression
in their daily lives. [15]
• Queer activists rarely seem to have a very well worked out vision
of the society they would like to see. This is understandable, given
that the decades in which queer politics emerged were ones in which
traditional conceptions of socialism seemed largely discredited. But
given that queer politics expresses a deeply felt rebellion against
the lives that queer people are forced to live under patriarchal
capitalism, it seems incomplete if it does not include an explicit
rejection of patriarchal capitalism. This suggests that radical
queers should take up and develop the analyses that an earlier
radical generation made during the lesbian/gay liberation movement,
of the roots of gender and sexual oppression in the capitalist family
and the way it helps reproduce labor and authoritarian social hierarchies.
The use of the words "some," "sometimes," "can," "tend to" and so on
in these remarks is not simply an attempt to soft-pedal criticism. It
reflects the real diversity of queer activists. For every group that
shares these weaknesses, there may be another one somewhere that has
overcome them, or is at least trying to. This is a reason to hope for
the emergence of a radical queer current that is better organized,
more oriented to the broader range of LGBT people, more ethnically
diverse, more genuinely global in its politics, more materialist and
profound in its analysis and that thus can lay the basis for a
powerful queer anti-capitalism and feminism.
--
This article was originally published in Against the Current # 146,
May-June 2010
--
Peter Drucker is a gay activist in The Netherlands. Originally from
the US, he was from 1993 to 2006 Co-Director of the International
Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam. He has written
books and articles on the LGBT movement worldwide, and notably has
edited and introduced a pioneering anthology on Third World gays and
the left, called Different Rainbows
--
NOTES
[1] The first two waves were the sex reform movements of the late
19th and early 20th century see e.g. John Lauritsen and David
Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), Ojai, CA:
Times Change Press, 1995 and the lesbian/gay liberation movement of
the 1960s and '70s.
[2] For a cogent and balanced Marxist appreciation and critique of
queer theory, see Gabriel Girard, "Théories et militantismes queer:
réflexion à partir de l'exemple français" (2009)). An abridged
English translation is available under the title "Queer theories and
militant practices")
[3] For a critical analysis of early queer nationalism, see Peter
Drucker, "What is queer nationalism?" Against the Current 43
(March/April 1993).
[4] John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and gay identity," in Ann Snitow et
al. eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1983.
[5] See e.g. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture,
and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, New York: Basic
Books, 1994, 334-46.
[6] # See Alan Bérubé, "Marching to a different drummer: lesbian and
gay GIs in World War II," in Snitow et al. eds.
[7] See Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America, The
Americanization of the Homosexual, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982, 79-97).
[8] (Gluckman & Reed 1997, xv).
[9] M.V. Lee Badgett, "Beyond biased samples: challenging the myths
on the economic status of lesbians and gay men," in Amy Glucksman and
Mary Reed eds., Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community and Lesbian and
Gay Life, New York: Routledge, 1997, 81.
[10] M.V. Lee Badgett and Mary C. King, "Lesbian and gay occupational
strategies," in Glucksman and Reed eds., 68-9.
[11] See Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk eds., From ACT UP to the
WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of
Globalization, London: Verso, 2002.
[12] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry
into Freud, Boston: Beacon, 1955.
[13] For a comparable argument made during the second wave of
feminism, see Jo Freeman, "The tyranny of structurelessness," Ms.
Magazine, July 1973
[14] For an approach to the issue of same-sex marriage that tries to
be both nuanced and radical, see FI 15th World Congress, "On
lesbian/gay liberation," 2003, , point 17
[15] One French participant in the Returns of Marxism discussion
mentioned that there is in fact an LGBT Muslim group called Queer
Jihad, and that the French queer group Pink Panthers have had a
working relationship with the radical immigrant group Indigènes de la
République.
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