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Marc Stein
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 11, Number 4,
2005, pp. 605-625 (Article)
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B o o k Rev i ew
THEORETICAL POLITICS, LOCAL
COMMUNITIES
The Making of U.S. LGBT Historiography
Marc Stein
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 1940–1970
John D’Emilio
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. x + 257 pp. 2nd edition: Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998. xvi + 269 pp.
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis
New York: Routledge, 1993. xvii + 434 pp.
Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town
Esther Newton
Boston: Beacon, 1993. xiii + 378 pp.
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the
Gay Male World, 1890–1940
George Chauncey
New York: Basic, 1994. xi + 478 pp.
Men Like That: A Southern Queer History
John Howard
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xxiii + 395 pp.
GLQ,11:4
Vol. 1, pp. 000–000
GLQ
997605–625
Paul EeNam Park Hagland
pp.
© Duke University
Press
Copyright
© 2005 by
Duke University Press
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GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972
Marc Stein
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. xv + 457 pp. 2nd edition:
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. xv + 461 pp.
Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality
in the Pacific Northwest
Peter Boag
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiv + 321 pp.
Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965
Nan Alamilla Boyd
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xii + 321 pp.
More than twenty years have passed since John D’Emilio turned his PhD
dissertation into Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, the fi rst scholarly monograph in what is now generally called U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) history. D’Emilio was not working in isolation in the 1970s and 1980s;
researchers inside and outside U.S. college and university history departments
shaped the field’s development.1 D’Emilio’s 1982 dissertation was not the fi rst
of its kind: Salvatore Licata produced “Gay Power: A History of the American
Gay Movement, 1908–1974” in 1978, and Ramón Gutiérrez finished “Marriage,
Sex, and the Family: Social Change in Colonial New Mexico, 1690–1846” in
1980. Outside the discipline of history, Toby Marotta’s Politics of Homosexuality,
which was based on his 1978 dissertation and covers some of the same ground as
D’Emilio’s book, was published in 1981. From outside the university, Jonathan
Ned Katz’s Gay American History (1976) featured not only an extraordinary collection of primary documents but also influential interpretive commentary.2 Nevertheless, D’Emilio’s book, more than any other, established the framework in
which most U.S. LGBT historians have operated for more than two decades.
Working in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall riots, D’Emilio challenged
the myth that homosexual life before Stonewall was marked invariably by “silence,
invisibility, and isolation” (1).3 This view was popular not only in straight society
but also among post-Stonewall gay liberationists and lesbian feminists, whose generational hubris discouraged respectful recognition of predecessors. Influenced
by the new social history, which focused on ordinary people, everyday life, and
the worlds of workers, women, and ethnoracial minorities, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities concentrated on the “homosexual emancipation movement” of
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
the 1950s and 1960s, but it established a broader framework that emphasized
the existence of same-sex sexual desires and acts across U.S. history, the emergence of homosexual identities and communities in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, and the development of organized LGBT activism after World
War II. In an often-cited passage, which conceptualized relationships between
politics and communities, D’Emilio wrote: “The [homosexual emancipation] movement constitutes a phase, albeit a decisive one, of a much longer historical process
through which a group of men and women came into existence as a self-conscious,
cohesive minority. Before a movement could take shape, that process had to be far
enough along so that at least some gay women and men could perceive themselves
as members of an oppressed minority, sharing an identity that subjected them to
systematic injustice” (4–5).
To explain the emergence of what he meaningfully called a homosexual
“class” (11), D’Emilio developed a form of Marxist feminist social constructionism that highlighted the effects of industrialization and urbanization on household
economies, family dynamics, and relations between the sexes.4 Of central importance was the rise of homosexual “consciousness,” a critical term in the 1970s
for feminists, who valued “consciousness-raising,” and for those influenced by
E. P. Thompson, whose title The Making of the English Working Class provided
a template for D’Emilio’s subtitle, The Making of a Homosexual Minority.5 As
for LGBT activism, D’Emilio argued that mass mobilization during World War II
led to “a nationwide coming out experience” (24), and the subsequent Cold War
campaigns against homosexuals inspired the creation of the Mattachine Society, One, and the Daughters of Bilitis. D’Emilio’s periodization emphasized the
movement’s leftist origins in the early 1950s, its subsequent “retreat to respectability” (75), and then its turn to militancy in the mid-1960s, when, influenced
by other protest movements, East Coast activists adopted “civil rights” strategies (149) and “the movement and the subculture converge[d]” in San Francisco
(176). This, argued D’Emilio, set the stage for Stonewall and the transformative
mass movement of the 1970s.
Since 1983 U.S. LGBT historical scholarship (meaning scholarship that
shares the discipline’s interest in the dynamics of continuity and change) has
developed in multiple directions, but much of it has taken the form of local studies that respond to D’Emilio’s national narrative. For those familiar with historical
scholarship on other subjects, this pattern, which allows for a national narrative to
be tested, rejected, qualified, and developed, is not surprising. Local history has
been particularly appealing for those interested in resisting the hegemony of the
nation-state, those connected with community-based history projects, and those
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influenced by microhistory, ethnography, geography, and public history. According to the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History (an affi liated society of the
American Historical Association), of the roughly fifty PhD dissertations produced
since D’Emilio’s on U.S. LGBT historical topics, about half can be classified as
subnational in focus.6
Local LGBT history has been marked by some of the common problems
of local history. Microhistorical details may fascinate those who know the region,
but bore others. Local boosterism and competitive rivalries have led to hyperbolic
claims about which were the queerest places and which the most challenging for
queers (and, by extension, queer researchers). Moreover, professional pressures
to demonstrate national significance have encouraged premature pronouncements
about the typical, atypical, or prototypical aspects of local phenomena. Nevertheless, for twenty years local history has been the field’s dominant genre.7 This essay
reviews several works (including my own) in three waves of local historical scholarship, arguing that D’Emilio’s framework has held up remarkably well.8
Buffalo, Cherry Grove, and New York City, 1993–1994
Three early local studies, each examining a region of New York state, concentrated on community consciousness and cultural resistance in contexts that mostly
did not include LGBT political groups. These works developed D’Emilio’s framework by picking up on trends seen in working-class, women’s, and black history,
which had moved through stages focusing on oppression, then organized movement
resistance, and later everyday resistance, with intersections of class, sex/gender,
and ethnicity/race receiving increased attention over time. Like much historical
scholarship produced in this period, these books also integrated elements of the
new social history, the new cultural history (which emphasized Geertzian thick
description, Foucauldian discourse analysis, Bakhtinian language criticism, and
elite and popular cultural studies), and the new political history (which examined
power in multiple forms and spheres).
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis’s book on Buffalo
lesbian history, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, responded to D’Emilio’s work in
several respects. Like D’Emilio, Kennedy and Davis were reacting against a popular myth; in their case, the myth was that pre-Stonewall working-class butches
and femmes were “pathetic imitators of heterosexuality” (2) who had succumbed
to oppression. Challenging this view, they argued that butches and femmes, especially in bars and house parties, “forged a culture for survival and resistance” (1)
from the 1930s to the 1960s. Kennedy and Davis took this to be one of the “signs
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
of a movement in its pre-political stage” (2), attributing the concept of prepolitical resistance to the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. According to Kennedy and
Davis, these “strong and forceful participants in the growth of gay and lesbian
consciousness and pride” were empowered feminists and “necessary predecessors
of the gay and lesbian liberation movements” (2). They speculated that, except for
ethnoracial differences, the local culture was “probably similar to that of other
thriving, middle-sized U.S. industrial cities” (10), but their claims about the significance of working-class lesbian resistance extended beyond such places.
In dialogue with D’Emilio, Kennedy and Davis noted that the small
national homophile movement emphasized “accommodationism” (273) and “held
itself separate from the large gay and lesbian communities that centered in bars
and house parties” (2). Observing that “D’Emilio’s work suggests, but does not
itself explore, that bar communities were equally important predecessors” (2),
they examined one such community as it took shape in the early twentieth century,
grew during World War II, and became more defiant after the war. Like D’Emilio,
Kennedy and Davis described worlds marked by class, sex/gender, and ethnoracial diversity, focused on sexual communities, and highlighted agents of social
change. But they provided more in-depth discussion of semiautonomous workingclass, middle-class, white, and black communities; devoted more attention to sex,
passion, and intimate relationships; and gave more credit to multiracial workingclass bar patrons than to mostly middle-class and white homophile activists. Kennedy and Davis embraced social constructionism, but they focused on the transition from a dominant “gender inversion” model, which viewed butches as unlike
straight women and femmes as like them, to a dominant homosexual “object
choice” model, which identified both butches and femmes as lesbian (326). Like
D’Emilio, they historicized the construction of community consciousness, but Kennedy and Davis concluded on a partially deconstructive note, looking forward to
“a movement that both defends gay rights in a homophobic society on the basis of
the assumption of a fi xed gay identity, and envisions a society where sexuality is
not polarized into fixed homo/hetero identities” (387).
In short, Kennedy and Davis departed from D’Emilio in some ways but
joined him in searching for the antecedents of post-Stonewall mass mobilization,
identifying World War II and Stonewall as turning points, viewing consciousness as critical, and attributing importance to relationships between politics and
communities. They, too, recognized that not everyone who engaged in same-sex
sex identified as lesbian or gay, saw themselves as part of a sexual community,
resisted anti-LGBT oppression, or participated in organized LGBT movements.
But they, like D’Emilio, were interested in dynamics of change, focused on resist-
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ing agents who contributed to change, and valorized moments when cultural
resistance and political activism “meshed” (373), which in Buffalo did not occur
until the late 1960s.
Esther Newton’s book Cherry Grove, Fire Island, which examined a resort
town forty-five miles east of New York City, worked within a similar paradigm.
Newton singled out her subject as “America’s fi rst gay and lesbian town” (iii),
“the world’s only geography controlled by gay men and women” (3), and the “gay
world’s mecca” (9). “Cradle of many gay fashions and institutions, creative hotbed of camp theatricality, and a fabled paradise of sexual licence” (9), the Grove
exerted “disproportionate influence on the image or paradigm of what it meant
to be gay” (11). Newton’s study began in the 1930s, when LGBT people associated with the New York theater world began to vacation in the Grove; traced the
transformative effects of a hurricane in 1938 and World War II in the 1940s;
explored repression and resistance in the 1950s; examined diversification, commercialization, and politicization in the 1960s; discussed gay liberation, lesbian
feminism, and LGBT capitalism, tourism, and leisure in the 1970s; and concluded
with AIDS in the 1980s.
Challenging the myth that pre-Stonewall homosexuals were “pitiable
victims,” Newton argued that “Grovers played a major part in forging the more
dynamic and complete identity that would later be associated with gay liberation”
(39–40). Unlike gay city neighborhoods, the Grove’s character was “based on protective isolation,” but the town was “like an oasis in the desert—the dream of what
was to come” (111). Of critical importance was the town’s contribution to “gay
nationalism,” the notion that “sexual orientation constituted a broad and compelling common identity more important than the categories of class, race, ethnicity,
and gender” (142). Much of the book examined gay sexism, white racism, and
conservative class politics, but whether discussing campy theatrical productions
or group sex in public, Newton emphasized the construction and deconstruction of
community bonds. She was more critical of her subjects than Kennedy and Davis
were of theirs, and while she agreed that “the paradigm of homosexuality has
been undergoing a slow shift” from gender inversion to object choice, she noted
that “the third sex model is tenacious” (145). But Newton agreed with D’Emilio
and with Kennedy and Davis on the significance of community consciousness.
Although she acknowledged that the boundary “between gay and straight is arbitrary and permeable,” she insisted that “for persecuted minorities, identity politics have their time, place, and necessity” (10).
Like D’Emilio and like Kennedy and Davis, Newton expressed admiration
for agents of change who resisted oppression. For her, that meant LGBT people
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
who claimed space, developed the queer economy, deployed the “gender theatrics” (75) of camp and drag, and used organizational vehicles such as the Arts
Project, the Property Owners’ Association, and the Ad Hoc Committee to Save
Cherry Grove for positive purposes. But Newton also argued that “for any resort
to become politically active works against a fundamental dichotomy in industrial
life between leisure time and work time” (237). Contrasting the “camp/theatrical
sensibility” of the Grove with the “egalitarian/authentic” sensibility of the LGBT
movement (85), she devoted more attention to the former. Nevertheless, when discussing police raids in the 1960s, Newton emphasized the Mattachine Society’s
successful intervention and criticized Grovers, who “could not mobilize to protect their civil rights and sexual preferences, partly because of internal divisions,
partly because of shame and guilt, and mostly because the Grove’s special character . . . was not publicly acknowledged” (193). In her discussion of post-Stonewall
developments, Newton was critical of Grove political ambivalence, arguing that
“gay liberation’s fundamental premise, that gay people must openly declare their
sexual preference, was a direct challenge not only to the dominant society but also
to the old gay survival methods” (237). She concluded by declaring that “gay culture in both its camp and egalitarian aspects must and will be recognized” (299),
which was a variation on D’Emilio’s discussion of what he termed the subculture
and the movement.
One year after Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold and Cherry Grove, Fire
Island were published, George Chauncey’s Gay New York made clear in its subtitle, Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940,
that it followed D’Emilio in working within a Thompsonian tradition in which the
gay world was made and was made in cities. Key terms in the subtitle referenced
the prehistory of corresponding terms in D’Emilio’s title, fi lling in D’Emilio’s
broad historical sketch by identifying the roots of the post–World War II sexual
system in the pre–World War II gender system, the roots of politics in culture, and
the roots of the homosexual minority in the gay male world.
Chauncey labeled the views he was challenging “the myths of isolation,
invisibility, and internalization” (2). D’Emilio had emphasized the flaws of these
myths in relation to the 1950s and 1960s; Chauncey discussed their failings in
relation to the preceding period, when “a highly visible, remarkably complex, and
continually changing gay male world took shape in New York” (1). Here gay men
constructed “spheres of relative cultural autonomy” (2), especially in enclaves in
the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square. Chauncey highlighted
three features of the gay world: its most visible elements were working-class (with
distinct ethnoracial components); it was undergoing “a transition from a world
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divided into ‘fairies’ and ‘men’ on the basis of gender persona to one divided into
‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ on the basis of sexual object-choice” (358);
and it was becoming “more rigidly segregated” from the straight world (9). In
terms comparable to Newton’s, Chauncey wrote that the country’s “gay capital”
had “disproportionate influence on national culture” (28). Careful to note that
New York was not necessarily “typical” because of its “size and complexity,”
Chauncey speculated that it may have been “prototypical” (29).
On the surface, Chauncey’s periodization differed from D’Emilio’s insofar
as he argued that “gay life in New York was less tolerated, less visible to outsiders,
and more rigidly segregated in the second third of the century than the first” (9).
For Chauncey, positive changes occurred during World War I and the 1920s and
negative ones during the 1930s, when the end of Prohibition and the enduring
Great Depression contributed to a conservative backlash and “exclusion of homosexuality from the public sphere” (331). Chauncey’s claim about the century’s
second third will presumably be developed in his forthcoming second volume; this
evaluation differs from the more positive assessments of changes during the 1930s
(and beyond) in Buffalo and Cherry Grove, which could reflect substantive disagreements, local variations, or sex differences. But Chauncey’s argument about
World War I paralleled D’Emilio’s about World War II. And he presented their
positions as reconcilable, endorsing the argument that World War II was transformative but pointing out that the “evidence that a generation of men constructed
gay identities and communities during the war does not in itself demonstrate that
the war generation was the first generation to do so” (11).
For Chauncey as for his predecessors, the growth of communal identity
was key. The rise of “gay” consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s, he argued,
reflected the decline of an earlier system in which the terms fairy, queer, and trade
“distinguished various types of homosexually active men: effeminate homosexuals, more conventional homosexuals, and masculine heterosexuals,” and the rise
of a new system in which the term gay “tended to group all these types together”
(21).9 Paralleling Kennedy and Davis’s discussion of femmes, though referencing
an earlier period, Chauncey argued that masculine men who engaged in same-sex
sex typically identified themselves as normal in one era but gay in the next. Here,
too, periodization differences could reflect substantive disagreements, local variations, or sex differences. Like Newton, Chauncey emphasized that elements of the
older system did not disappear but highlighted the transition from one dominant
model to another.
Chauncey also joined his predecessors in identifying agents of social change
and emphasizing “the politics of gay culture” (269). Like Kennedy and Davis, he
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
criticized scholars who “construe resistance in the narrowest of terms—as the
organization of formal political groups” (5). Invoking the anthropologist James
Scott’s work on “the tactics of the weak,” he argued that “everyday resistance”
was “remarkably successful in the generations before a more formal gay political movement developed” (5). Many resistance strategies focused on avoidance
and survival, but when discussing cultural politics and social change, Chauncey
highlighted the actions of “drag queens,” “fairies,” and “pansies”; the efforts of
gay bars that “challenged their prohibition in the courts”; and the roles of those
who “organized groups to advocate the homosexual cause” (5). The latter referred
to the establishment in the 1930s of the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants,
which Chauncey presented as pointing the way to the future. On the critical issue
of gay consciousness, Chauncey indicated that middle-class white men led the
way. The paradoxical suggestion was that the less resistant (men who were more
discreet, private, and masculine than fairies) contributed more to the rise of a
consolidated gay identity, and this change, the precondition for gay history, was
not necessarily positive.
Mississippi and Philadelphia, 1999–2000
Brett Beemyn’s 1997 anthology Creating a Place for Ourselves marked a significant
moment in the rise of local LGBT history, bringing together older work on Buffalo,
Cherry Grove, and New York and newer contributions on Mississippi; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Chicago; Detroit; Washington, DC; and Flint, Michigan.10 In
the next few years John Howard’s book on Mississippi and mine on Philadelphia
were published. Insofar as both were conceptualized before the New York studies
were published, it is not surprising that they responded more to D’Emilio’s book,
in Howard’s case by criticizing his urban, progressive, and identity-based paradigm and in mine by challenging his characterization of the homophile movement.
Both books examined places not commonly associated with significant LGBT cultures and in this respect were more similar to Kennedy and Davis’s book than to
Chauncey’s or Newton’s. In different ways, both were influenced by the “queer”
turn in LGBT studies.11 Nevertheless, their conclusions suggested the need to
qualify and modify (rather than reject) D’Emilio’s narrative, a sign that this work
remained the field’s frame of reference.
For Howard’s Men Like That, the myths to be challenged had been formulated by D’Emilio and adopted by others: that “gay identity and culture formation” were “linked to capitalist industrialization and urbanization” and that
LGBT “desire, identity, community or culture, and political movement” should be
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“arrayed in chronological fashion,” in a “linear, modernist trajectory” (12). Howard disputed the notion that queer cultures were quintessentially urban and that
southern, rural, and small-town America was exceptionally antiqueer. Focusing
on Mississippi and emphasizing “circulation rather than congregation” (xiv), he
argued that “men interested in intimate and sexual relations with other men found
numerous opportunities to act on their desires” (xi). In “distinct but interwoven”
(17) black and white worlds, “homosexuality and gender insubordination were
acknowledged and accommodated with a . . . pretense of ignorance” (xi). Arguing
for a “specific” but not necessarily a “unique” queer state, Howard left open “the
extent to which queer genders and sexualities in Mississippi appear akin to those
in other places” (xix).
Criticizing “identity-focused studies” (xiv), Howard argued that the concept
of “gay community,” which he equated with a “place-based, sustained, urban gay
enclave” (rather than an imagined community), “did not pertain in Mississippi”
or apply to “the shape and scope of queer life” (14–15). Referencing his title,
he wrote that the book focused on both “men like that,” meaning “self-identified
gay males,” and “men who like that,” meaning men who “like queer sex . . .
but do not necessarily identify as gay” (xviii). According to Howard, the latter
group “probably predominated” (5). In some respects, these men were similar to
Chauncey’s “normal” men before the 1930s and Kennedy and Davis’s femmes in
the 1930s and 1940s. But Howard challenged “the Great Paradigm Shift” (xvii),
the notion that there was a transition from a gender system in which homosexuality was conceptualized in terms of acts to a sexual system in which homosexuality
was conceptualized in terms of identities. Focusing on the period from 1945 to
1980, when the New York studies suggested that the older system was in decline,
Howard emphasized that it remained in place in Mississippi, where “queer sexuality continued to be understood as both acts and identities” (xviii).
In several ways, then, Howard challenged D’Emilio’s national narrative. Yet the difficulties of escaping that narrative were illustrated by the extent
to which he offered a counternarrative framed in opposition. Moreover, Howard
endorsed D’Emilio’s arguments about World War II. In addition, although he criticized the urban paradigm, he devoted significant attention to the “spell, sway, and
influence” (14) of Mississippi’s largest city, Jackson, and in arguing for “an understanding of urban centers not only as centripetal, but also as centrifugal” (14), he
underscored their importance.
Howard also reproduced the trajectory of desire, identity, community, and
movement. Discussing his book’s structure, he wrote that the first part discussed
“contexts” and the second “changes” (xxi). Significantly, the fi rst part focused
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
on desires and acts; the second turned to “identity, community, and politics”
(xviii). Howard actually discussed change in both, emphasizing in the fi rst part
that queers “changed Mississippi,” “transformed the sites they occupied,” and
“remade themselves” (36). Yet the changes highlighted in the second part, which
drove his narrative forward, were produced by more traditionally defined political
and cultural agents, who “found themselves in increasingly politicized positions”
and “moved onto the public stage” (xvii). The imagined and real queerness of the
black civil rights movement, for example, unleashed a conservative backlash in
the 1960s. Cultural producers and audiences used songs, fi lms, novels, and art
to circulate queer and antiqueer representations. LGBT activists worked through
a short-lived “southern manifestation” (232) of the homophile movement in the
1950s, the Mississippi Gay Alliance (MGA) in the 1970s, and gay churches in the
1980s, when LGBT Mississippians achieved “greater levels of community solidarity and political power” (231). Discussing the limited success of the MGA, Howard
argued that “gay organizing clashed with local sensibilities, queer and nonqueer,”
which was another variation on D’Emilio’s discussion of movement-subculture
relations. Howard wrote that the churches were more successful, because the
state’s “queer Christians . . . rarely responded to a narrow gay movement driven by
identity politics”; they preferred “a more expansive definition of gayness” (231).
(Arguably, the churches were driven by the dual identity politics of LGBT Christians, and non-Christians probably did not see such definitions as “more expansive.”) Nevertheless, the new discourse “channeled queer feelings into particular
modes of gay being and homosexual identity” (251). Although critical of what was
lost in this process, Howard affirmed that this is what occurred. His last chapter
focused on public scandals involving two local politicians accused in the 1970s
and 1980s of having feminizing, same-sex, interracial sex. Howard used these
episodes to highlight the ongoing influence of the act-based queer paradigm. His
evidence also showed, however, that these politicians were struggling against an
ascendant identity-based gay paradigm, which one of them eventually embraced.
Overall, while Howard’s book criticized D’Emilio’s framework, it was more effective at suggesting that the framework needed to be qualified than at offering a
replacement.
My book on Philadelphia, which focused on relationships between lesbians and gay men in “everyday geographies,” “public cultures,” and “political
movements” (v), probably fit most readily into D’Emilio’s framework, though it
challenged his characterization of the homophile movement.12 Chronologically,
City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves began with the end of World War II, accepting D’Emilio’s argument about the war’s importance, and complemented his dis-
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cussion of national repression in the 1950s with analysis of local examples and
variations. Though the period chronicled in the book ended in 1972, the point of
extending the discussion beyond Stonewall was to assess continuities and discontinuities across this turning point. Socially, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves
privileged sex differences, but it also examined gender, class, ethnicity, and race.
Geographically, the book looked at a “forgotten big city” (17), “probably North
America’s biggest city without a reputation for a sizable lesbian and gay community” (7–8). In my 2004 preface I argue that learning that New York and San
Francisco “featured large and dynamic LGBT worlds before the 1970s” was “not
nearly as surprising as discovering that such worlds existed in Philadelphia,” a
finding that suggested that “every large city in the United States likely featured
important LGBT communities” (ix).
Beyond challenging myths about Philadelphia, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves criticized “the tendency to conceive of lesbians and gay men as either
entirely distinct or completely conjoined” (3) and the tendency to view everyday
resistance and organized politics as either mutually supporting or fundamentally
opposed. In looking at “convergences and divergences” (10) between lesbians and
gay men, the book followed the lead of D’Emilio and Newton. In exploring a location featuring “dynamic relationships” between everyday resistance and homophile politics, it followed the lead of D’Emilio. As I argued: “Everyday resistance
not only inspired, supported, and sustained organized movements, but also worked
at odds with them. Activists often encountered opposition and apathy in the communities that they purported to represent, and community members often encountered opposition and apathy in the movements that purported to represent them”
(6). In this respect, my book warned against romanticizing either communitybased resistance or homophile movement activism.
Like D’Emilio, I highlighted the roles of LGBT political groups, arguing
that “organized movements . . . have been key agents of historical change” (4) and
emphasizing “the power that these groups gained to represent, politically and textually, the ‘imagined community’ of lesbians and gay men” (185). Like Howard’s
book, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves began with a section that examined
everyday life and everyday resistance across the entire period, but then it proceeded chronologically, fi rst exploring public debates about same-sex sexuality
in the 1950s and then looking at homophile, gay liberation, and lesbian feminist
groups in the 1960s and 1970s. While my analysis followed D’Emilio’s in emphasizing that community consciousness preceded political activism, which in turned
produced new ways of imagining community, it modified D’Emilio’s portrayal of
the movement. First, Philadelphia’s early homophile era did not feature a pre-
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
dominantly male Mattachine Society and an exclusively female Daughters of Bilitis. Instead, the local Mattachine Society and Janus Society brought women and
men together, and this shaped the groups’ strategies of respectability. Second, in
the mid-1960s part of the homophile movement embraced the sexual revolution,
igniting a sex war with the more respectable activists discussed by D’Emilio. For
example, Janus, which had become a national organization led by men, published
the sexually risqué Drum magazine, which became the country’s most widely
circulating LGBT movement periodical. Adopting a politics of sexual liberation,
Janus offered another instance of the movement and subculture converging, but
in this case the convergence centered on sexual politics, which led to devastating
state repression. Third, other homophile groups carried forward the politics of
militant respectability into the 1970s, suggesting continuities between pre- and
post-Stonewall activism. Fourth, multicultural post-Stonewall gay liberationists
and lesbian feminists, on separate but parallel paths, rejected the “minority”
model, criticized the homo/heterosexual binary, called on everyone to come out,
and thus reconceptualized relationships between sexual politics and sexual communities (13).
Although City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves emphasized the diversity of
homophile strategies and the sexual radicalism of one homophile faction, its overall conclusion offered a queer critique of LGBT sex/gender conservatism. “Rather
than represent a ‘queer’ alternative,” I argued, lesbians and gay men “participated
in and contributed to a conservative consensus about the nature of differences
between women and men,” “reproduced the dominant system of relations between
the sexes,” and “not only left binary sex oppositions in place but reinforced their
strength” (386–87). In the end, then, my book may have modified the portrait of
the homophile movement presented by D’Emilio, but it joined his in presenting
critical historical perspectives on LGBT politics and communities.
The Pacific Northwest and San Francisco, 2003
By the turn of the twenty-first century there seemed to be enough local historical
studies to allow for comparative or synthetic work. Yet in many respects the local
monographs were not comparable. Of the ones discussed here, only Chauncey’s
examined the period before the 1930s, and it looked only at men in the country’s
largest city. Kennedy and Davis’s book focused on women in a midsize city. Newton’s explored a small-town resort. Howard’s examined men in a southern, rural
state. Mine focused on men and women in a big city and explored a time and place
with an active “community” and “movement.” These differences made it possible
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to compare subjects defined as dissimilar but not those defined as similar. This
began to change with the publication of two books on West Coast cities.
Peter Boag’s Same-Sex Affairs examined late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Portland, a “dynamic midsize urban center” (1), but also looked more
broadly at the Northwest. Responding most directly to Gay New York, with which
it shared chronological parameters and a focus on male genders and sexualities,
Boag’s book nonetheless worked within D’Emilio’s framework. It was structured
around three comparisons, the fi rst of which followed Gay New York and Boots
of Leather, Slippers of Gold in highlighting class differences. Emphasizing the
distinctiveness of the Northwest, which featured a high male-to-female sex ratio,
a large multicultural population of transient male laborers, and a white middleclass sector much affected by the rise of corporate capitalism, Boag argued that
migratory working-class cultures tended to feature couplings of older “jockers”
and “wolfs” with younger “punks” and “lambs” (25–26). In these encounters,
the older partner typically “penetrated” the younger one, either anally or between
the legs. In dialogue with Chauncey, Boag argued that in the Northwest masculine “punks” were more significant than feminine “fairies,” and same-sex sexuality was conceptualized more in age-stratified than in gender-stratified terms.
Middle-class cultures, in contrast, tended to feature age-homogeneous couplings,
and oral sex was more accepted. In Portland, working-class and middle-class cultures developed distinct same-sex sexual geographies and institutions. Workingclass same-sex sex was often conceptualized by dominant society as a product of
class, ethnic, and racial degeneration and was actively repressed. Middle-class
same-sex sex was largely ignored until public scandals contributed to the emergence of modern conceptions linking homosexuality with middle-class whites,
whose identity models and sexual practices “contributed a great deal to America’s
first sexual revolution” (10).
A second comparative discussion, more influenced by D’Emilio, dealt with
cities and hinterlands. Examining working-class cultures in nonurban work camps,
hobo jungles, and transportation vectors, Boag also explored what happened to
these cultures when their participants moved to or through the city. According to
Boag, “openness, acceptance, and common practice rather than obscurity, disdain, and infrequency were responsible for transient same-sex sexuality” on the
road (39), while “most large cities, despite drawing in gay men, remained hostile”
(41). In this respect, Boag joined Howard in rejecting the “traditional ‘wisdom’
that rural America is a place averse to homoeroticism and lacking in attractiveness to a community of individuals with same-sex sexual interests” (41). Yet Boag
also explored urban middle-class geographies and formations, making it clear that
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
he favored “the tradition that holds that modern ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ communities
emerged first in cities” (6). In this way, he developed D’Emilio’s argument about
urbanization, and he similarly developed D’Emilio’s argument about industrialization by emphasizing the sexual significance of the new corporate white-collar
sector.
A third comparative discussion contrasted the periods before and after a
major Portland vice scandal in 1912, which brought unprecedented public attention to the “homosexual” culture of middle-class whites. Before 1912 “the most
visible same-sex sexual subculture in the Northwest was one that the region’s predominantly transient labor force had forged,” and “its visibility was due in part to
middle-class white society’s concerted surveillance” (3). The 1912 scandal, which
centered on a local YMCA and implicated middle-class whites, led to a “seismic
shift” (4) in which “the broader Northwest citizenry fi rst learned that a thriving
male homosexual community existed in their midst” (2). Ultimately, this led “progressive” reformers to initiate harsh crackdowns. Meanwhile, homosexuality also
became implicated in regional class struggles when political populists attacked
the sexual corruption of business and reform elites. Boag thus concurred with
D’Emilio not only on the importance of nineteenth-century socioeconomic transformations but also on the significance of dynamic relationships between politics
and communities.
Nan Alamilla Boyd’s Wide-Open Town opened up multiple translocal
comparative possibilities insofar as it covered women and men, before and after
World War II, in “bar-based cultures” and “homophile communities” (6). Like
D’Emilio’s work on movement-subculture convergence, Boyd’s focused on San
Francisco, which had “a uniquely queer environment in the post-Prohibition era”
(11). From its origins as a “frontier town” marked by multicultural diversity, high
male-to-female sex ratios, “lawlessness,” and “licentious entertainment” (2), San
Francisco developed a “live-and-let-live sensibility” (4) that encouraged gender
and sexual commerce, tourism, transgression, and vice.
Chronologically, Boyd suggested several modifications to D’Emilio’s framework. Like D’Emilio, she highlighted transformations in the late nineteenth century, when publicly visible LGBT cultures emerged in the context of industrialization and urbanization. Like Chauncey and Boag, she emphasized the repressive
campaigns of early-twentieth-century social reformers. Boyd’s portrait of San
Francisco in the 1930s, however, differed from Chauncey’s portrait of New York
insofar as San Francisco’s “publicly visible queer cultures and communities . . .
blossomed in 1933 with the repeal of Prohibition and the emergence of queer
entertainments in the city’s tourist-district nightclubs, bars, and taverns” (5).
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While Boyd accepted the notion that World War II “transformed” the city (112),
she emphasized that it “functioned to elaborate and extend the tourist-based cultures that emerged in the post-Prohibition era, rather than to fundamentally alter
them” (9). As for the post–World War II era, her book, like D’Emilio’s, Newton’s,
and mine, examined new forms of repression and resistance in the 1950s. Highlighting the emergence of the homophile movement, Boyd followed D’Emilio in
emphasizing its leftist origins in the 1950s, its turn to assimilationist respectability, and its radicalization in the 1960s. Boyd’s book ended with an episode
identified by D’Emilio, the 1965 New Year’s Day raid on a costume ball organized
by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual; the response to this raid demonstrated “the growing political strength of what was increasingly known as the city’s
‘gay community’ ” (6). Boyd concluded that while Stonewall was a “turning point”
on the East Coast, it was not “a mobilizing factor in San Francisco” (10). Thus
she departed from D’Emilio’s conclusions, but without comparing the pre- and
post-Stonewall eras. Moreover, Boyd’s argument paralleled D’Emilio’s insofar as
the 1965 ball, “much like New York City’s 1969 Stonewall Riots, concentrated the
political energies of organizations already in place” and “hastened the politicization of bar-based populations” (236).
Along with her predecessors, Boyd explored the rise of “gay” consciousness. Like Howard, she argued against a “linear relationship between behavior,
identity, community, and activism” (14), used the term queer for those “who did not
identify themselves as gay or lesbian” (6), and emphasized that for many decades
“queer communities . . . did not form a cohesive whole” (5). As she pointed out,
“Sometimes the differences between queer communities overwhelmed the possibility of forging a larger collectivity, but at other times—during a bar raid, perhaps—a larger sense of community seemed on the brink of articulation” (5–6).
Articulation began in the 1950s, when entertainers promoted the notion of “a ‘gay
community’ ” (59) and “the gay bar evolved into a kind of politicized community
center” (62). Early homophile groups introduced “the necessary fiction of national
community” (162), and in the 1960s “what was increasingly called a ‘gay community’ in San Francisco began to look and act like a formidable political constituency” (19).
As for agents of resistance and change, Boyd joined Kennedy and Davis as
well as Chauncey in emphasizing bar-based cultures. Especially important were
entertainers and bar owners, some of whom began in the 1940s to wage court battles for LGBT rights. According to Boyd, the greatest challenges to dominant society did not come from “factions that clearly articulated same-sex sexual identities or aligned themselves with overtly political organizations” but instead derived
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
from “queer and gender-transgressive groups that occupied the social world of
bars” (14). Invoking Kennedy and Davis’s work, she argued that bar-based resistance was “prepolitical” in relation to homophile movements but “political” (12)
insofar as “traversing landscapes and claiming space had a political momentum
of its own” (14). Specifically referring to bar-based court battles, Boyd criticized
“the standard view that the homophile movement led the way in developing formal political resistance strategies” (111) and emphasized that homophile activists
“distanced themselves from the working-class and transgender culture of queer
bars,” “promoted gender-normative identities,” and favored “integration” and
“assimilation” (14).
Boyd thus claimed to disagree with D’Emilio, but D’Emilio had also highlighted the homophile movement’s “retreat to respectability” and its distance from
LGBT communities (in the second part of his three-part schema). Furthermore,
Boyd acknowledged that the homophile “contribution to queer life in the city was
profound” (147). Like D’Emilio, she argued that the homophile movement changed
in the 1960s, when various developments “forced bar-based and homophile movements to work together” (18). Exploring new campaigns and groups, including the
League for Civil Education, the San Francisco Tavern Guild, the Society for Individual Rights, and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, Boyd argued that
“a new discourse of resistance emerged on the border between San Francisco’s
queer-bar cultures and its homophile communities” (18). She concluded, “Where
bar-based constituents had asserted collective rights (the right to association) and
homophile communities had asserted individual rights (the right to due process),
the emergence of a viable political constituency suggested an alternative approach
to civil rights—a minority-based discourse based on equal protection law” (219).
In the end, Boyd joined D’Emilio and me in suggesting that the homophile movement turned in new, more radical directions in the mid-1960s. While she joined
Howard in rejecting a linear narrativizing of behavior, identity, community, and
activism, her book, like his, reproduced this framework when analyzing change
over time.
Historiographical Conclusions
In the fall of 2003 the Social Sciences Research Council sponsored (and Margot
Canaday and Pippa Holloway organized) “Sexual Worlds, Political Cultures,” a
conference inspired in part by the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. Many of the conference participants paid homage to D’Emilio’s work, not necessarily because they agreed with everything he
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had written but because his book had proved so compellingly productive. Another
sign of D’Emilio’s influence is that of the U.S.-focused dissertations in the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History bibliography that are not local studies, many
focus on political themes initially explored in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. One example by David K. Johnson, recently published as The Lavender Scare,
integrates a local study of Washington, DC, with analysis of federal government
persecution in the 1950s and 1960s, a subject highlighted in D’Emilio’s book.
D’Emilio’s influence can also be traced in dozens of other books and articles on
local U.S. LGBT history, including those that concentrate on queer formations not
directly linked to the “sexual politics” and “sexual communities” highlighted in
D’Emilio’s book.
In making a case for D’Emilio’s influence on local studies, this essay has
minimized departures, disagreements, and conflicts. The local studies may have
shared with Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities a foundation in Marxist feminist
social constructionism, but they have built on this foundation to stress the importance of cultural developments. They may have followed Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities in emphasizing urbanization, industrialization, and wartime mobilization, but they have also placed cities within larger regional geographies; examined corporate capitalism, tourist economies, real estate development, and cultural
commercialization; and explored multiple wars, migrations, and mobilizations. The
local works may have agreed with D’Emilio that new identities and communities
emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but those identities
and communities look more diverse now, and their class, ethnoracial, sex/gender,
and sexual features have been examined in greater depth. Moreover, processes of
identity and community consolidation appear more complex and contested; the
transition from gender inversion to homosexual object-choice models, if there has
been one, seems less complete; there is a greater sense of what was lost as well as
what was gained in these developments; and there is a greater appreciation of the
importance of queer desires and acts that exceed the bounds of homosexual identities and communities. The local studies may have agreed with D’Emilio on the
historical significance, changing politics, and multiple strategies of the post–World
War II homophile movement, but they have expanded the concept of LGBT political
resistance, highlighted more of the movement’s conservative and radical features,
and offered new ways of conceptualizing relationships between politics and communities. The local studies may have shared with Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities
a sense of the importance of Stonewall, but they have offered new perspectives on
when, where, whether, why, and for whom Stonewall was a turning point.
Nevertheless, D’Emilio’s broad historical framework, built on a sequential
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
narrativizing of desires, acts, identities, communities, and movements, remains
strong. I would argue that this sequential narrative has been adopted so widely
(even by those who have criticized it) not because we have failed to appreciate
what it leaves out, not because it helps us offer stories of progress, and not because
we have failed to imagine queerer possibilities. Rather, it reflects what history
today tends to be: not the study of the past, which after all is what many disciplines explore, but the critical study of change over time, with special emphasis
on human agents of change. As Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities first demonstrated in the field of U.S. LGBT history, the sequential narrativizing of desires,
acts, identities, communities, and movements offers a compelling way of writing
critically about dynamics of change in the twentieth century. For better and for
worse, when Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities and its progeny address these
dynamics, they imagine cultural communities and political movements coming
together to make meaningful social change.
Notes
For opportunities to discuss some of the ideas presented here I thank audiences at the
University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (especially Jeffrey Merrick) and Swarthmore
College (especially Timothy Stewart-Winter). Conversations with Laura Doan at GLQ
helped immensely. Jorge Olivares reads and improves virtually everything I write for
publication. Over the years I have been enriched greatly by dialogue with most of the
scholars whose works are discussed in this essay.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Among the early U.S.-based scholars who most influenced the later development of
U.S. LGBT history were Henry Abelove, Allan Bérubé, Michael Bronski, George
Chauncey, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Martin Duberman, Lisa Duggan, Lillian Faderman, Estelle Freedman, Eric Garber, Jonathan Ned Katz, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Joan Nestle, Esther Newton, Leila Rupp, Judith Schwartz, and Carroll SmithRosenberg.
Licata’s dissertation, completed at the University of Southern California, was never
published as a book. Gutiérrez’s dissertation was revised and published as When Jesus
Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico,
1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). See also Toby Marotta, The
Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981); and Jonathan Ned Katz,
Gay American History (New York: Avon, 1976).
In this review I cite the first edition of D’Emilio’s book.
On this part of D’Emilio’s framework see Steven Maynard, “ ‘Without Working?’
Capitalism, Urban Culture, and Gay History,” Journal of Urban History 30 (2004):
378–98.
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5.
6.
7.
8.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon,
1964).
For the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History’s bibliography of history dissertations see www.usc.edu/isd/archives/clgh/dissertations.html. I prepared the original
version; it has been updated by Leisa Meyer.
Even works that do not appear to be local in general orientation have adopted local
modes of analysis. See, e.g., the discussion of Sacramento in Sharon R. Ullman, Sex
Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); of Chicago and New York in Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White
Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997); of Memphis in Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers:
Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and
of Washington, DC, in David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004).
This essay was conceived as a work of historiography, which historians generally
understand to refer to the history of history (with history defined as the study of the
past). Historiographical writing usually reviews and analyzes the development of
scholarship over time, focusing, for example, on scholarly trends, patterns, conversations, dialogues, debates, paradigms, continuities, and discontinuities, as well as on
the larger contexts that influenced these developments. Some readers may be troubled
by the section of this essay that focuses on my own work, but there is a tradition in
U.S. historiographical writing of discussing one’s own contributions to a field. See,
e.g., Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American
Women in History,” Gender and History 1 (1989): 50–67; Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,”
Journal of American History 75 (1988): 9–39; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “More than the
Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American
History 75 (1988): 842–56; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Hearing Women’s Words:
A Feminist Reconstruction of History,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in
Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 11–52; and Joe William Trotter Jr.,
“Black Migration in Historical Perspective: A Review of the Literature,” in The Great
Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender,
ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–21.
Including my own work in a discussion of historiographical developments posed several challenges, and I thank the friends, colleagues, and readers who have worked to
ensure that I am neither too easy nor too hard on my own work. For various reasons,
pretending that I have not published in this field (or acknowledging that I have but
only in a cursory way) did not seem like a viable option as this essay took shape. The
implicit and explicit criticisms of the field that I make in the essay’s introduction
THE MAKING OF U.S. LGBT HISTORIOGRAPHY
and conclusion should be read as applying to my own work as well as to the other
works discussed. That said, I recognize that some of the essay’s arguments can be
read as partial (in both senses of the term) defenses of my particular contributions;
that would be the case if I did not include a section on my own work, and similar
claims could be made about most reviews written by scholars about the work of other
scholars. The standard work on U.S. historiography, which foregrounds debates about
“objectivity,” is Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the
American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
9. Chauncey made a similar argument in earlier work on Newport, Rhode Island, in
the 1910s, but the need to take care in making generalizations about language is
suggested by the fact that queer referred to feminine men in Newport but nonfeminine men in New York. See George Chauncey Jr., “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual
Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the
World War I Era,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 189–212.
10. Brett Beemyn, ed., Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997).
11. On the queer turn and its relationship to U.S. history see Henry Abelove, “The
Queering of Lesbian/Gay History,” Radical History Review, no. 62 (1995): 44–57;
Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Lisa Duggan, “Making It Perfectly Queer,”
Socialist Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 11–31; William B. Turner, A Genealogy of Queer
Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); and Martha M. Umphrey,
“The Trouble with Harry Thaw,” Radical History Review, no. 62 (1995): 8–23.
12. For a different challenge to D’Emilio’s characterization of the homophile movement
see Martin Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001): 78–116. In this review I cite the first edition of my book.
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