LGBTQ+: Strange Bedfellows part 1
How the Gay and Lesbian movements went from opposition to partners
The movement that is identified by the alphabet soup of genders and the rainbow flag is not only a new movement, but also one that does not make much sense from a historical basis. In one regard, this can be seen as the quintessential example of the Social Justice, Post-Marxist, Applied Postmodern philosophy (for a look at this movement, see my series here). What this is, is a grouping of “oppressed” groups designed to seek political power and to destabilize traditional systems.
In many ways, this movement is the conjoining of historically and philosophically opposed groups. The uniting of these groups as a political unit is a very recent and very curious phenomenon. While most today look at the gay and lesbian movements as essentially the same: homosexuals, both male and female, the truth is that these were historically opposed to one another. It helps to look at the history of these movements and how they came together.
Gay Rights
As I have previously noted, throughout pagan societies, including the ancient world, it was not unusual for men who had power to use others for their sexual pleasure, including other men and adolescent boys. However, these men never thought of themselves in terms of a sexual identity and, therefore, were not self-identified homosexuals. In fact, their behavior was more like the modern category of bisexual since they used both men and women for their sexual pleasure and always married women to procreate and secure heirs.
Sigmund Freud was the first to speak of sexual preferences as part of one’s identity. This started a shift to create the very idea of one as a homosexual, as opposed to the historical thought that “homosexual” referred only to the type of act. Now, it has become an identity. At first for Freud and his followers, this was a disorder that needed psychological treatment. However, over time, it became more common to be embraced by homosexuals as their identity.
he societal upheaval of the Second World War then caused a curious shift as well. Suddenly, men were being transplanted both in the military and in support of the war effort. Included in this was the growth of San Francisco as a key place for naval development and military research. This brought young men from all over the country there, uprooted from their home contexts.
Not only was there a great upheaval, but it was bringing men to California. Being the far extreme of the Westward expansion of the United States, it was already a place where people would go to reinvent themselves. The 1849 gold rush brought men who were seeking wealth. Others came to put behind them criminal pasts or other weights from previous lives. As a result, when these young men came to San Francisco, they were coming to a place where people took on new identities.
These young men included those who had not fit in with the culture of their hometowns, including those who had homosexual desires. As a result, a new movement of identifying and living as homosexuals was born. In similar ways, other cities also saw men who had felt like outcasts in their hometowns being brought together to form a new group that celebrated their identities.
These homosexual enclaves were counter-cultural and largely illegal. This started to change in the 1960s. This era of the sexual revolution included a “gay revolution.” The term “gay” was chosen as a more positive word to portray their lifestyle, since “homosexual” had negative connotations. In this regard they jumped on the advances in marketing and persuasion, choosing to relabel themselves to give their lifestyle a more positive light.
The gay revolution advocated a total reorientation of society to embrace homosexuality as normal. Denis Altman, who chronicled the early gay revolution, is quoted as noting, “No longer is the claim made that gay people can fit into American society, that they are as decent, as patriotic, as clean-living as anyone. Rather, it is argued, it is American society itself that needs to change”[1] These radicals threw away the idea that they should convince the world that they were just like everyone else, instead the idea was that “Blatant was Beautiful.”
Then on June 28, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village of Lower Manhattan. While these sorts of raids were not uncommon in the 1960s, something changed in this one. The raid caused an eruption of violence and protests, with protests continuing regularly for weeks. The Stonewall riots also took advantage of the developments of the times, including television news footage of the police using force to quell the uprising. This is what started the shift in public opinion, as these men were depicted as innocent victims of police brutality purely based on their “sexual preferences.” The first anniversary of the Stonewall riots then saw the first gay pride parades. Thus, from this point forward, the gay movement went public and on the cultural offensive.
In the mid-1960s psychologist George Weinberg coined the phrase “homophobia” to describe the hostility that many had towards gays and lesbians. He then popularized this term, as well as emphasizing the healthy nature of homosexuality in his book Society and the Healthy Homosexual in 1972. He was also instrumental in getting the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from being considered a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).[2] The result of Weinberg’s work, along with many others, was to totally flip things from homosexuality being seen as a disorder to now not affirming homosexuality is seen as a disorder. Some today go as far as considering homophobia a mental disorder.
Lesbianism
One curious thing about these events was that they also changed the relationship between male homosexuals and lesbians. Historically, lesbianism has been primarily a rejection of male domination and of men in general. Lesbianism saw male homosexuality as an enemy and one example of male oppression. Since much of the history of male homosexual behavior was about those who had power using others as their sexual toys, some women rejected men entirely. As recently as the 1970s, the two movements had a troubled relationship that made cooperation between the two unthinkable.[3]
So called “second-wave feminism” ran from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. Second-wave feminism can be divided into three basic branches: liberal, materialist, and radical. The radical branch of second-wave feminism focused on the problems of patriarchy and, therefore, viewed men as an oppressor class and women as the oppressed.[4] This led to many radical feminists rejecting men and embracing lesbianism as an alternative. Since the gay movement is, by definition, a male movement, it was seen as an enemy that could not be trusted.
Lesbianism, therefore, saw growth in parallel with the gay revolution. This movement was also spurred on in a curious way by the broader sexual revolution. Not only was this seen as an alternate form of sexuality to be explored, but also some fled to lesbianism because of the abuses of the Sexual revolution. Adrienne Rich argues that the rise of pornography was a major factor in this, as it objectified women for male enjoyment. Therefore, lesbianism rose as a reaction to this as men were seen to be more generally as exploiters of women.[5]
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend
These two movements, who had distrust of each other, were moved more towards each other through the change in perception of gay men as an oppressed minority. Lesbianism had long felt itself a refuge of oppressed women, and second-wave feminism reinforced this perception. However, lesbianism also tended to view gay men as part of the oppressor class of men.
Then, when the Stonewall riots broke out, suddenly the gay men were depicted as an oppressed minority, much like the black community of that era. With this, the narrative started to shift from men, including gay men, being the oppressors of women to heterosexuals being the oppressors of gays and lesbians.
The gay victimhood narrative really took off during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Here calls for gay safe-sex practices were rejected and anything that inhibited total sexual freedom was anathema. Now lesbians saw gays as fellow oppressed and so the two bonded together against the culture they saw as oppressing them. This led to the formation of the Lesbian and Gay Community Center (1983) which later led to the founding of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP, 1987).[6]
Thus, these two movements that had been in parallel but opposed to each other were now united. In the next post in this series, we will look at how this cooperation between gays and lesbians expanded to take in the whole plethora of genders that are talked about today.
You can find the next post here.
[1] Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (New York: Alyson Books, 2006), 339–40.
[2] “George Weinberg | Biography & Facts | Britannica,” 31 January 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Weinberg.
[3] Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020), 345.
[4] Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody, First Edition. (Durham, NC: Pitschstone, 2020), chap. 6.
[5] Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (1980): 641.
[6] Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 348–49.