Pink Triangles: Radical Perspectives on Gay Liberation

  Introduction

Pam Mitchell

The fourteen essays that follow were written by a variety of activists involved in Left politics in general and in gay liberation in particular. They are not meant to represent all views or touch on all issues related to these topics, but to provoke thought about how the two can and must relate to one another. The collection is by no means comprehensive. Contributions by lesbians or gay men of color are notable for their absence. Issues of particular interest to gay men are better represented than are issues of specific concern to lesbians. We expect to publish a sequel to this collection that will include responses to these essays and that will provide a chance to correct these deficiencies. Because the essays were not written specifically for this anthology, they are not uniform in tone — some more academic, some more personal — and they vary in the extent to which they focus on theoretical issues. But as Judy MacLean notes, to link socialism and lesbianism is to link the unpopular with the taboo; and that shared experience of being double outsiders, gay people on the Left, leads to a common thread of understanding that runs through all the articles in this collection.

It is evident to all the authors that the existence of gay men and lesbians as a group with a culture of our own has political significance, and that our oppression is neither a historical accident nor an isolated case. The essays show that as a group we are in fact oppressed, and that we are oppressed because we are a threat. Reforms — gay civil rights, affirmative action for gay men and lesbians — will not and cannot be enough to overcome that oppression, although they may make life better for some individuals. Reformism pits our group against other oppressed peoples. At best it puts some of us in positions in which we can actively serve the interests of the class in power. It does nothing to alter the present political and economic system, a system that depends upon competition, hierarchy, the sexual division of labor, and that is therefore needed to oppress us in the first place. In order to overcome gay and lesbian oppression we must first understand why it arose and the functions it now serves in maintaining the status quo. Out of that understanding, and out of the culture and institutions that have already been created and adapted by gay men and lesbians, we must develop strategies and visions for massive social change that gets to the roots of our oppression.

The essays in the first section establish that a gay and lesbian culture (or cultures) does exist, and that the ideas and institutions that we share contain the seeds of our liberation but are also instruments of our own oppression. We cannot simply seek the freedom to perpetuate and expand gay and lesbian lifestyles as they now exist. Charley Shively points out some ways that gays oppress other gays. Christine Riddiough discusses some of the negative aspects of bar culture. The discussions on pornography and paedophilia and lesbian and gay male sexuality look at ways in which we express our sexuality, the most personal aspects of our lives as well as the ones for which we have had to pay most dearly, and show how our behavior often reflects sexist and capitalist ideology. At the same time, however, the authors show that our culture is subversive and potentially revolutionary — because we don’t conform to the traditional family and have come up with alternatives, because we affirm a sexuality that has nothing to do with reproduction, because we dare to be different, to challenge laws and norms out of a respect for our own needs and values as human beings. We can be proud of what we have and build upon it.

The articles in the section on radical theory and gay liberation share a belief that the experiences of gay men and lesbians uphold the validity of many of the basic tenets of traditional Marxism, but that an expansion of socialist theory is necessary. All the authors have been influenced by the women’s liberation movement and its critiques of socialism; and though the interpretations of the interplay between sexism and capitalism, and between the personal and the political, vary from article to article, there is agreement that gay people are in a unique position to contribute to a rethinking and revitalization of socialist theory. To the Marxist-Leninist Los Angeles Research Group, the capitalist bourgeoisie continues to be the only real opponent, while sexism and heterosexism are extensions of capitalist ideology. Gay liberation is a relatively minor issue, albeit a significant one for those directly effected; but more importantly, heterosexism on the Left is indicative of a more pervasive blindness to the significance of the meaning of sex and sexism in capitalist ideology, a blindness that will hold back the Revolution to come. The other authors are not as quick to identify patriarchy as a side effect of capitalism, and the relationship between the two is one of their main topics of discussion.

Because our very existence is inconsistent with the categories of sex and gender that many institutions are built upon, gay men and lesbians have an outsider’s view of how the system works as well as some experience with creating alternatives. In the third and final section three activists write about gay people on the Left, both as critics and as builders, and share their own visions of the process of building a new society. In his postscript to an article written in the early ’70s, David Fernbach talks about recent experiences that have radically altered his perceptions of what needs to be done. Judy MacLean discusses the needs of individuals within the movement and the ways in which meeting those needs now can contribute to a strategy for greater changes to come. Marc Killinger’s review article discusses and compares different strategies and visions. His postscript, which sums up his view of where the lavender Left is now and where he sees it heading, is a fitting end to the collection.

August 1980

I.

Culture and Politics

Christine Riddiough

Culture is one of those vague terms that tends to mean everything and nothing. Is culture simply aesthetic and intellectual endeavors like opera, ballet, painting — the fine arts and their allies? Does it include the more popular expressions of art like movies, TV, and disco music? Is culture even more than this? And what of culture and politics: do they interact only when a political group sponsors a concert as a way of raising money? Too often these limited views of culture and its relationship to politics are the ones held by socialists. In his paper American Indian Culture: Traditionalism and Spiritualism in a Revolutionary Struggle Jimmy Durham describes this very accurately:

For example, a group of white leftists decide to hold a conference. They know in an abstract way that they have been robbed of their culture and that culture is important in revolution. Therefore, they set aside one or two evenings during the conference as cultural evenings. Songs are sung and poems are read, but these cultural activities are not integrated into the conference itself — instead they are isolated as special events. More important, and more to the point, no one really sees and analyzes the ways in which the conference itself is a cultural event. (p. 1)

In order to act politically, to be effective and to understand the society in which we live, we have to have a fuller sense of culture. Durham goes on to say:

…all human beings are cultural beings; we cannot operate outside of society as natural animals. Our societies, our culture, define us, in large part, and our way of experiencing the world is through our culture. Politics, economics, science and technology, language, etc. are all cultural phenomena, finally, of course, political phenomena. (p. 2)

In the United States our culture is shaped by many forces including those things not often thought of as culture, like TV and popular music and shopping centers and political campaigns. And while all of us live to some extent in that culture — the world of MacDonalds and Christmas and cars — many of us also live in another culture, the culture of our social group. For while straight white men in the U.S. generally live in and define the ruling culture, those outside that group have brought with them and developed a culture of their own within the dominant one. Among these groups are gay men and lesbians.

Gay Culture

What is gay culture? Webster’s describes culture, in general, as the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action and artifacts and depends on man’s [sic] capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. [It is] the customary beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious or social group. Gay culture, then, includes institutions such as bars, centers, papers; it includes the language, humor and ideas of gay people.

In looking at gay culture, it is important to note first of all its unique relationship to mainstream culture. Gay people are both the most integrated and most isolated minority in this country. Unlike other oppressed groups, gay people are not relegated to certain jobs, social strata or neighborhoods. While there are some occupations and communities that are disproportionately gay, nonetheless gay people can be found in every workplace and neighborhood. We can also be found in every family. Because of this, gay culture is in several ways different from other minority cultures within the U.S. Gay people are not born into gay culture — it is something we enter as adults or young adults. Gay culture is not passed down with the family tradition, but is distinguished by being outside the family structure. Nonetheless, gay/lesbian culture does have a historical tradition (as documented particularly in Katz’s Gay American History).

Because of the aforementioned diversity of gay people, gay/lesbian culture has less of a geographic focus than most minority cultures, though in large cities there is likely to be a gay ghetto — an area where many gay people, especially gay men, live and work. Furthermore, gay/lesbian culture has a greater focus on social and personal institutions and, except for those few people who actually live and work in the community, has only limited connections to people’s work lives. In fact, for many gay people, a lot of energy goes into keeping the two parts of their lives separate.

These factors have shaped gay/lesbian culture; some non-gay people might even question its existence, but a rich and varied culture does exist. A full examination of it is not possible here (for that see, in particular, Jay and Young’s Lavender Culture), but we can look at some of the most important aspects of it.

The Bars

The concrete institutional focus of gay and lesbian culture is the bars. In The Front Runner, by Patricia Nell Warren, one of the main characters, Harlan Brown, is near the Stonewall bar in June 1969. Seeing what is going on, he becomes angry and sad. He thinks, I didn’t drink, but those bars were about the only public places where gays could be themselves. No straight could understand how precious they were to us. (p. 31) The bars have been the cornerstone of gay/lesbian culture and community. They are a place to meet friends and lovers, a place to dance, play pool, talk. They have provided a family for those who, having come out, no longer have families. They have provided a refuge from the straight world — little gay islands in a hostile sea.

Of course gay bars are at the mercy of that sea: frequently owned by straights (though less so now than in the past), they are subject to pressure from the police, organized crime and local queer-baiters. As primary meeting places for gays, they have clear limitations — most notably the alcoholism they promote.

Who goes to the bars? At some point almost every gay person does. Some people never feel comfortable in the bars, while for others they become a second home. In between is a large group of people who go to the bars on occasion — with friends, when visiting a new place or when looking for a new lover. It’s not unusual to see a group of people come into a bar after a feminist newspaper meeting, or a gay church service, or a women’s concert.

Thus while there are those who don’t like the bars, there are still enough people who go to them for every city of any size to have at least one. In the cities with the largest gay communities, there may be upwards of one hundred bars. In these places each bar will have its own particular atmosphere and clientele. Where there are many bars, some of them (10 to 20 percent) will be women’s bars, while the others will be primarily men’s. There are black and Latino bars, discos, leather bars and drag bars.

While there may be a generalized bar crowd, each bar will tend to have its own specific crowd. In Chicago, for instance, there is one bar that most appeals to feminist women, another where most of the women are over forty and/or have been out fifteen years or more. The first bar plays disco and feminist music on its juke box, while the second includes Bobby Vinton and the Beer Barrel Polka.

Going to the bars means learning bar behavior. There aren’t guides to bar behavior, nor formal rules of etiquette like Amy Vanderbilt or Emily Post, but there are informal rules. Many bars have rules, often unwritten, about what is proper attire. Bar owners will sometimes ban someone from their bar for what they consider improper behavior. And there are some unwritten rules for interactions among the customers — who you look at, buy a drink for, ask for a dance. Much of this sets the standards for cruising, especially in women’s bars where it may be less open than in men’s bars. That cruising is an important part of bar behavior for both women and men cannot be overemphasized. While in a straight bar the customers are usually sitting facing the bar, watching the TV or talking to the bartender, in a gay bar customers will frequently be turned at least partly away from the bar and looking at the customers. Since gay bars have been one of the few places where gay people can meet potential lovers, this cruisiness is no surprise.

The bars have been and remain, even now, the focal point of the gay and lesbian community. They are the most stable institution in a frequently unstable world. As such they shape the culture of gay life, even as they are shaped and changed themselves. They contain within them all the contradictions and weaknesses of gay life. Nonetheless, they are our territory, even with all the control that the outside world exerts. While political gays, especially feminist lesbians, often criticize the bars (and rightly so) for their weaknesses, their importance cannot be denied.

The Arts

Gay people have often been associated with the arts — theater, dance, literature, painting. We have often been thought of as shapers of art and fashion. At the same time the arts have often shaped the lives of gay people: from the salons of Paris in the ’20s and ’30s, to the piss elegant apartments of today. Art is the arena in which gay people have frequently been the most accepted and at the same time most ghettoized. There is a certain amount of glamour attached to the arts that somehow softens the impact of gayness for many non-gay people. An early issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation had an article on lesbianism that included the statement that lesbians in Paris are exotic. Lesbians next door are perverted.

The impact of gays in the arts goes beyond the high culture of ballet and theatre to the more popular forms like disco. Disco is the latest music craze in the U.S. One of its characteristics is that its popularity comes not so much through radio as through cabarets, bars and clubs. In this way it is made for the gay scene which also has a focus on the bars. Disco stars often got their starts in gay bars and still have gay followings. Some of the music, like the Village People or Disco Queen, is openly gay — at least to those in the know. The Village People’s title cut on their first album is not only a gay song, but actually a gay liberation song. Non-gay audiences seem to avoid making these connections no matter how obvious they are. Disco has roots in other cultures as well, as Kopkind has pointed out in a recent article; it comes from black and Latino music as well as the gay scene. But gay culture helped shape disco — gave it much of its emotion and energy and sensuality; and those characteristics are more apparent now in a gay disco than in a straight one. As disco has become more popular, it has become whitewashed and straightened out, but the original elements are still in it.

Disco also wrought changes in gay culture. It reinforced the role of the bars and at the same time opened them up. Many ’50s and ’60s gay bars hadn’t allowed dancing; disco changed that. It also made it more possible to dance in an emotional and sensual way without attaching that to a particular person; it is not a romantic form of music.

Another musical expression that has roots in gay, and specifically lesbian, culture is women’s music. Unlike popular music, women’s music is rarely played on the radio; records are often difficult to find. Nonetheless, there is a growing audience for it among lesbians and feminists (frequently overlapping groups). While the music itself is pretty much middle of the road, with occasional hints of country, rock and other styles thrown in, the lyrics are powerfully political — feminist, and often lesbian, oriented. The best example of lesbian music is the album Lesbian Concentrate, which is a collection of lesbian-oriented songs by many of the best known individuals and groups in women’s music. Alongside the music itself has developed a women’s distribution and production network, so that much of women’s music exists completely outside the established music hierarchy.

Both in content and production women’s music parallels other women’s art, particularly writing. There are more and more feminist novelists, poets, essayists; and in the production end there are feminist printers and publishers and bookstores. Though most of these feminist networks, and the artists and producers in them, are identified with labels such as women’s music, feminist writers, women in distribution, clearly many of the individuals are openly lesbian. More importantly, the tone and content of much of their work is lesbian, and belongs as much to lesbian culture as to women as a whole.

Language/Camp

In order to communicate, people within a culture need language; gay culture is no exception. While the language in the U.S. is English, there are words and phrases that have taken on different meanings, meanings that are only known to those within the gay/lesbian community (though of late some gay words have become popularized). Many of these gay words have obscure origins. An effort to compile a gay dictionary and trace word origins has been made in the Queen’s Vernacular. The meanings and uses of words vary from place to place and from time to time, but some words have been in use for a relatively long period. For example, gay itself has a long history, as do the phrases coming out and in the closet. These phrases have no equivalent in straight vocabulary because they describe the common experiences