Outside The Walls Of Academe

Battles for tenure and promotion hurt the Stonewall generation in its attempts to build an institutional framework for research on lesbian and gay life. The widespread homophobia of academic life discouraged many scholars from devoting themselves to research on homosexual themes. Emotionally drained by faculty politics, heavy teaching loads, and their colleagues' rejection of the legitimacy of research on homosexuality, many gay academics retreated into self-imposed exile. Most serious research on gay and lesbian life came from scholarly writers and intellectuals outside the university. Their work appeared in books, community newspapers, and magazines such as the Body Politics, Sinister Wisdom, Gay Community News, Heresies , and the Advocate , or in leftist journals such as Radical America and Socialist Review .

Although gay scholars gave up trying to form a national organization to advance lesbian and gay studies, some continued to work on their own research projects in isolation or outside the university. The new leftist idea of history from the bottom up, combined with the feminist motto "The Personal Is the Political," gave intellectual significance

to what appeared individual and private. The widespread interest in black and women's social history inspired some activist-writers to look at gay history.

In 1971, gay activist Jonathan Ned Katz launched his research, starting only from the presumption that gay American history actually existed. In June 1972, he mounted a dramatization of some of his early discoveries in a documentary play Coming Out , modeled on Martin Duberman's successful off-Broadway play In White America . Eventually, Katz's research led to two huge collections of lesbian and gay historical documents: Gay American History , published in 1976, and Gay/Lesbian Almanac , published in 1983. Katz also served as the general editor of the Arno Press series called Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History, and Literature. He directed a massive reprinting of over one hundred books, both classic and obscure, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that dealt with homosexuality. Also in the early 1970s, John D'Emilio and James Steakley—graduate students in history and German literature, respectively, as well as gay activists—explored homosexual emancipation movements in America during the 1940s and 1950s and in pre-Nazi Germany. First published in the Canadian gay journal the Body Politic , their work eventually appeared in book form. Lesbians and gay men interested in the past started community history projects such as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York and the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, where they collected historical materials and began to publish their results.

Throughout this period of apparent institutional dormancy—from the mid-1970s up to the late 1980s—some gay teachers, such as Jack Collins at City College of San Francisco, continued to teach lesbian or gay courses. In small liberal colleges, at big state schools, and in some elite universities, openly gay and lesbian teachers kept up the fight in their departments to teach courses dealing with homosexuality. In some instances, students took up the gauntlet and designed courses they taught themselves with the help of faculty sponsors.

During the following years, women's and gay caucuses formed in a number of academic professional associations, including the Modern Language Association (for teachers of language and literature), the

American Sociological Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Historical Association. These groups became forums in which openly gay and closeted academics alike could meet and discuss research on homosexual themes, as well as addressing job and research biases within the professions. In this same period, the Journal of Homosexuality gradually transformed its focus. Founded in 1974 by psychologist Charles Silverstein (coauthor with Edmund White of The Joy of Gay Sex ), and edited since 1977 by John DeCecco of San Francisco State University, it changed from a narrowly focused journal of psychology into a broad interdisciplinary journal of lesbian and gay studies.^[1]

This outpouring of lesbian and gay social thought and history in the early 1970s initially assumed that the homosexual experience in different periods of history and in different cultures reveals a type of human personality called the homosexual. Scholars looked for their antecedents as a way of claiming ancestors, of validating themselves through the achievements of great and famous queers and dykes. They searched for evidence that homosexuality is transhistorical, natural, or essential. Arthur Evans wrote articles in this vein for the radical political newspaper Fag Rag , and then in his 1978 book Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture .^[2] In the book, Evans linked the persecution of gay people to the repression of pagan witches. This book became an important source for the fairy movement, which celebrates gay male spirituality.

Lesbian and gay historians also discovered that homosexual activity frequently took place in some societies without the presence of people defined as "homosexuals," and that intense homosocial or erotic relationships existed between people who did not otherwise appear to be homosexuals. One solution to these puzzles had already been ventured by the British sociologist Mary McIntosh, whose scholarly paper "The Homosexual Role" had been published in the American academic journal Social Problems in 1968–even before Stonewall. Challenging the belief that "homosexuals" and "heterosexuals" were different kinds of people, McIntosh argued that homosexuality should be seen as a social role rather than a natural condition. Furthermore, she claimed that the social role describes not simply a pattern of sexual behavior but other kinds of cultural activities as well.

A group of young British gay leftists worked out the historical and political implications of McIntosh's thinking in their journal Gay Left (1975 to 1979). This perspective on the emergence of the homosexual identity informed Jeffrey Weeks's Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present , published in 1977. The Gay Left Collective writers elaborated on the making of the "modern homosexual" in a series of essays that they later collected in two anthologies: Homosexuality: Power and Politics , which they edited, and The Making of the Modern Homosexual , which Kenneth Plummer edited.^[3]

Eventually, this approach to gay history was identified as the social-constructionist theory of homosexual identity. French historian Michel Foucault's 1978 work History of Sexuality offered a similar account of the historical creation of the homosexual identity, but his work also presented a full-scale philosophical critique of "essentialism"—the belief that sexual identity is natural or has always existed, unaffected by social context.

The development of a social-constructionist interpretation of homosexual history is one of the major intellectual achievements of the Stonewall generation of lesbian and gay scholars. This theoretical paradigm provides the criteria for historical and social research. Thus, the question that would send the social constructionist off to the archives would be, for instance, "Why doesn't every society organize homosexuality in the same way that the classical Greeks did?" rather than "Why did the Christian Church repress the natural impulse of homosexual love?"

Another intellectual development in the 1980s that made a major contribution to thinking about lesbian (and, by implication, gay male) identity was the publication of This Bridge Called My Back . Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Barbara Smith, among others, contributed essays, poetry, and personal narratives to this anthology. Along with other books such as Sister Outsider (Lorde, 1984), Home Girls (edited by Smith, 1983), Borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987), and Loving in the War Years (Moraga, 1983), This Bridge Called My Back proposed a new way of thinking about cultural identity and difference.

These women of color criticized the impulse, widely prevalent among cultural feminists, to emphasize the essential similarities of all women, rather than differences of race, sexuality, and class among

women. This Bridge Called My Back warned against an enforced women's identity and, by implication, all attempts to downplay or disregard differences of color, gender, and sexuality. These writers' exploration of the overlapping identities of gender, race, and sexuality also implies criticism of universalistic conceptions of the making of the homosexual identity. It dealt a double blow, however, to lesbian-feminist theory; not only did it subvert essentialist models of female identity, but it also challenged feminist thinking about lesbian sexuality. For example, in "What We're Rollin around in Bed with," a 1981 article in Heresies , Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga looked at sexual roles, fantasy, and S/M as examples of sexual differences within the lesbian community. They saw simplistic notions of egalitarian relationships and the belief in politically correct sex as obstacles to freedom and an understanding of the true breadth of sexuality.

The political significance of different paradigms in lesbian and gay studies became apparent when lesbian and gay social constructionists clashed with cultural feminists over pornography and sexuality. Relying on gay and lesbian historical research that showed a wide range of sexual behavior and conceptions of identity among lesbians and gay men, social constructionists argued that shifting economic contexts, aesthetic standards, and social roles define sexual practices, sexual fantasy, and pornography. Cultural feminists, on the other hand, interpreted pornography as a transhistorical instrument of male domination and compulsory heterosexuality. These sex wars generated a body of groundbreaking writing that appeared in anthologies such as Pleasure and Danger , which Carole Vance edited, and Powers of Desire , which Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson edited.^[4]