Gay Liberation describes a new social movement that emerged in the USA initially and then swept the Western world from the late 1960s onwards. Deriving much of its early framework from the Black and Women’s Liberation movements, and borrowing from the anti-psychiatry and existing sexual reform movements, Gay Liberation initially sought to free human sexuality, particularly between people of the same sex, from regulation, persecution, pathologisation and stigmatisation. The agenda soon became to reform criminal and civil laws that treated homosexual men (and women where applicable) and their sexual behaviour as illegal or open to prosecution, and to remove human sexual expression from the professional gaze of science, which had relegated it to the realms of biological disease, mental illness or social deviancy. This agenda was preceded by, and drew on, forms of social unrest and civil protest developed in response to the Cold War and in opposition to the Vietnam War, and from the struggles after 1945 by developing countries to free themselves from Western colonialism. Hence, ‘liberation’ was the term adopted. Finally, the counterculture of the 1960s offered tactics (the ‘Zap’) and cultural resources (fashion, the arts, popular music) to carry protest to new heights of representation (e.g. the ‘kiss-in’) and performance (e.g. the ‘gender fuck’) (Richmond and Noguera 1973).
These forces produced among homosexual men and women a determination to resist oppression, as the opposing forces (e.g. the state, the Church, modern medicine) were characterised (Altman 1972). The birth of Gay Liberation involved street riots in New York on 27 June 1969, when gay men, lesbians, street hustlers and ‘queens’ (drag artists, transsexual and cross-dressing men) found a local bar again raided by police. It was the day of Hollywood star, chanteuse and gay icon Judy Garland’s funeral. Rather than submit to brutality and arrest, the saddened patrons of the Stonewall Bar in the West Village rioted. Four days of civil unrest followed with calls to end such persecution. The Stonewall Rebellion subsequently led to a mammoth re-appraisal of the situation of gay men and lesbians in a radical set of demands for social and legal change, and the elevation of homosexual interests, desires and practices to a revolutionary cry for liberation: ‘Get your laws off our bodies!’, ‘Two, four, six, eight: gay is just as good as straight!’, ‘It takes balls to be a fairy!’ Existing civil rights organisations such as the Homosexual Law Reform Societies in Britain and Australia, the Mattachine Society, and the Daughters of Bilitis in the US found their cautious lobbying style overtaken by radical forms of protest. Sexual revolution seemed not only necessary but imminent.
Various homophile rights movements had existed for over a hundred years in the West, and had achieved some success (e.g. the UK had legalised sex between men in private in 1967) (Weeks 1977). Gay Liberation quickly moved from the arguments of civil equality to radical positions influenced by the New Left, socialist theory and politics, and feminism. This was not surprising, as in many countries university students, already seeking other social change, provided Gay Liberation with an intelligentsia, developing new theory, linking various radical ideologies (e.g. Marxism and sexual liberation in critiques of Patriarchy and the ‘capitalist family’), and challenging existing frameworks of deviancy and medically pathologised sexuality (Foucault 1978). Gay Liberation demanded an end to all sexual categories and the freedom for all people to pursue and enjoy same sex pleasures and desires. The claim that sexuality could be the site of liberation from many oppressions formed a radical break with an agenda of civil equality and eventually led to a schism between more radical arms of the gay liberation movement and the progressive reform arms.
Notions of ‘gay pride’ used the inverted pink triangle (with which the Nazis marked homosexuals in concentration camps) as a symbol of freedom. The rapid development of a world-wide network of print media, publishers, conferences and national and international organisations revealed the power of the idea of sexual liberation, and provided momentum for the rapid reappraisal of sexuality that has proceeded undaunted ever since. All this activity influenced various academic disciplines in rethinking human sexuality, in recovering the history of gay and lesbian lives, in positioning the homosexual at the centre of art and literature, in rethinking modern medicine, particularly psychiatry and psychology, and in linking sexuality to analyses of power and inequality that have been advanced since the 1960s (Plummer 1981; Greenberg 1988). This activism and the flourishing literary, artistic and cultural work made visible and audible in a way never seen before the ‘love that dare not speak its name’.
What is left? The term is rarely used now, and if used invokes only the past. Presently, ‘gay community’ serves to describe the various collectivities of gay men around the world. Many reforms have been achieved to varying degrees, although the postcolonial legacy still dogs many developing countries. The advent of the HIV pandemic in the early 1980s left scars on gay men’s lives and robbed communities of many leaders, artists, intellectuals and activists. It forced an engagement with the public health systems and required a different type of politics accommodating the state. Sexuality became less a revolutionary act and more a form of individual comportment: a ‘good’ gay man practised safer sex and thereby helped stop the epidemic. Sexual freedom for all became civil equality before the law for homosexual sex and relationships, and placed homosexuality on a par with heterosexuality, rather than pursuing for all an unbounded sexual expression—universal liberation became a minority lifestyle.
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