PART THREE
FROM IDENTITY POLITICS TO RADICAL DEMOCRACY

Throughout the chaotic and manifold surges of the sexual revolution, new political projects, identities, and social movements have emerged to stake claims and secure rights. At the same time, other social actors have fought to limit those claims and revoke any new rights. Feminists fought for the legalization of abortion; religious conservatives tried to restrict those rights. Lesbians and gay men made "coming out" a political act; Anita Bryant led a campaign by religious conservatives to push homosexuals back into the closet, to retract the laws against discrimination that city councils had passed. Through this dialectic, the sexual revolution has been one of the pivotal historical processes shaping American culture since World War II.^[1]

During the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, many social movements and communities adopted identity politics. This strategy emerged by

incorporating cultural change as part of a political project; it enabled a movement's participants to transform their cultural identities while seeking recognition of their civil rights.^[2] Identity politics, however, reifies and institutionalizes personal and social identities, with the help of market dynamics; the politicized and culturally transformed self acquires the consistency and inflexibility of an object.^[3]

Moments of desire, the pleasure of sexual adventure, and the thrill of transgression repeatedly introduce new representations into the historical process, therefore, forcing changed definitions of identity to surface; this "perverse dynamic" undercuts the reified identities.^[4] Political actions, social images, and sexual experiences all interact vigorously.

Throughout the many battles of the sexual revolution, the political project of lesbians and gay men has undergone numerous redefinitions. Each new vocabulary implied an updated conception not only of homosexual emancipation but even of sexuality. Before the Stonewall riots, the tiny bands of homosexual activists called themselves "homophiles." After 1969, when the politics of coming out mobilized thousands, they adopted "gay." Then, after divisive conflicts between men and women, they included the term "lesbian."

Homophile activists battled over the significance of cultural differences. Were homosexuals just like heterosexuals except for their sexual preferences, or had homosexuals actually created a distinctive and viable culture? Transvestites, S/M, leather, butch/femme, transgender, the clone, the gym body, lipstick lesbians, men who have sex with men, bisexuality, the sexualities of different racial and ethnic communities and of classes—each reconfigures and deconstructs the fantasy of a unitary homosexual identity. The proliferation of "differences" found a political outlet in 1988 when Queer Nation was founded and "queer" became the new banner term—all queers were "different," so the term applied to everyone whose identity reflected a sexual difference. Each change in nomenclature reflected new distinctions—and each change in conception provoked new formulations of political goals.

Buffeted by both the proliferation of difference and the perverse dynamic (in which sexual limits are transgressed), identity politics enables self-expression and cultural transformation as a political goal. Then

each new identity group strives to achieve representation within "the rainbow of identities," but in the process it encounters limits. The multicultural project can only offer each new group limited space. Each identity group arrives, however, with huge investments in its "definition" and in its social boundaries. Thus, these groups' political agendas are usually quite rigidly determined. They remain fixed until new differences emerge within the identity group to burst it open and disperse its offshoots. Group identities can change in response to interactions with other groups; without those changes, no broad coalitions of identity and minority movements are possible.

Chapter 9, "The Limits of Multiculturalism," grew out of my experiences of working at OUT/LOOK magazine and organizing conferences. It was quite common for both editors and conference organizers to be criticized if they did not adequately represent groups who felt excluded or ignored. At OUT/LOOK and in organizing the first two national lesbian and gay writers' conferences, we adopted rigid guidelines to guarantee the representation of women and people of color. Although such schemes were well intentioned and worked with the groups designated, they usually failed to represent other groups adequately.

In such circumstances, time and space limitations create zero-sum situations—everyone must compete for a place in the sun. In addition, these problems impose what Kobena Mercer has called the "burden of representation" in which one voice, one image, or one person speaks for the whole group; this both burdens the voice who must represent the community and represents the others inadequately.^[5]

The essay examines how both political and cultural forms of representation create tensions and ambiguities in a multicultural project. Coalitions between different communities or movements cannot form without a public sphere in which the participants can communicate. A public sphere must be constructed that encourages dialogue between the various communities engaged in the multicultural project.

In the late 1980s, a new style of politics surfaced within the lesbian and gay communities. A movement called Queer Nation promoted a politics of "difference" as though it were a form of nationalism. Allan Bérubé and I wrote a short piece on Queer Nation to introduce a series

of articles on this new political trend; this piece is now chapter 10, "Reflections on Queer Nation." This brief note tried to situate Queer Nation in the history of homosexual politics.

All the essays in this book were written against the background of religious conservatives' vast campaign to eliminate the homosexual presence from American life. Chapter 11, "Culture Wars and Identity Politics," assesses different forms of gay and lesbian political activity—traditional post-Stonewall identity politics, AIDS activism, and Queer Nation—in relation to the political challenge posed by the Religious Right. None of the existing forms of gay and lesbian politics are adequate. Instead, the community needs to engage in a broader counter-hegemonic politics, and it must be willing to show initiative and leadership in forging a broad political response to the Religious Right.

9
The Limits Of Multiculturalism
Identity Politics and the Transformation of the Public Sphere

At the end of the twentieth century, U.S. society is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse; more polarized along class lines; more alarmed by lesbians, gay men, and other sexual minorities; more conscious of gender differences; and as a result, increasingly preoccupied with issues of representation.^[1] I mean "representation" in two senses: "political" representation—that is, the role of a delegate or a spokesperson for a particular community; and "cultural" representation—that is, how particular social groups are portrayed in fiction, in movies, or on television. Both meanings of the word involve communicating something about a particular group to the larger society.

Representational issues surface in a number of different contexts,

ranging from affirmative action hiring programs, concern about the effects of "political correctness," the composition of panels at conferences, college curricula and what "great books" are included in the canon, expressions of hatred on college campuses, stereotypes, and defamation in the public media. These examples originate in a society with an enormous array of culturally diverse, politicized communities. When the dominant political or cultural institutions do not accept the legitimacy of these communities, they make political demands in which they emphasize their strong collective identities.

Identity politics is a kind of cultural politics. The politics of identity can only exist in a culture that can create new and affirmative conceptions of the self, articulate collective identities, and forge a sense of group loyalty. In identity politics, as in nationalism, there is a strong emphasis on inventing a new language and vocabulary.^[2] As with nationalism, however, identity politics requires strongly defined boundaries between those who share particular collective identities and those who do not.

These questions of representation reflect a broader crisis. We no longer have any societywide framework of representation to which the majority of the population consents. The traditional modes of representation that functioned in this society until the 1960s (for example, the way various institutions assigned "slots"—such as jobs, delegates, or even token roles—to minorities and majorities [e.g., blacks and whites]) may not have been fair, but most of the political struggles up until the 1960s took place within that widely accepted political and cultural framework. It is increasingly clear, however, that the classic schemas of political representation in the United States have collapsed.^[3]

Multiculturalism is a loose ideological framework that offers a new model of representation. I believe, though, that the multicultural project can only provide limited representation unless it creates a framework that allows new political identities to emerge.

"Bridging" Identities

Political mobilization based on ethnic and group identity has characterized the United States since the late nineteenth century. Ethnic urban politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—for example,

the urban machine politics of New York's Tammany Hall—was not ideological. The new forms that have emerged since the 1960s, however, are more based on ideological conceptions of identity. One of the earliest and most influential expressions of this new identity-based politics was the black power movement that came out of the civil rights struggle of the late 1950s and 1960s.^[4] The women's movement, the gay and lesbian liberation movement, Chicano politics, and the environmental movement have adopted similar ideological and political forms, as illustrated by rhetorical appeals such as Sisterhood Is Powerful or Gay Power.^[5] This new form of discursively constituted identity politics, reinforced by the postindustrial reorganization of U.S. society, has led to the breakdown of the classical paradigms of representation in U.S. politics.^[6]

The vision of a multicultural society has long been a political current in U.S. history (for example, Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallen in the early twentieth century), especially on the Left (the Rainbow Coalition).^[7] Although the multicultural project rests on the expectation that different communities retain their cultural integrity within the coalition, it seems to offer a mode of social representation—so far mostly in the cultural arena. It also makes several social-psychological assumptions that limit its capability as a new mode of representation.

The very term "multicultural" assumes enduring and distinct cultural identities—both personal and collective. These collectively constructed identities require strong boundaries, however, to protect the values embodied in them from the powerful influences of the hegemonic culture looming outside. Because a community's values are embedded in their personal identities, other community members experience any modification of the normative boundaries of individual identities as a personal threat.

Those of us in the lesbian and gay community experience this phenomenon when someone we consider part of the lesbian or gay community forms a heterosexual relationship. Many lesbians and gay men view such an action as a form of social and personal abandonment. Thus, bisexuality is widely perceived as a "political" threat, as well as a personal one. For lesbians or gay men, the personal construction of

sexual identity is a difficult and drawn-out process involving heavy emotional and social costs. The implicit challenge of bisexuality serves as a reminder of the potential fluidity of sexual identity. Interracial relationships also challenge a community of color's sense of identity and solidarity. Spike Lee's movie Jungle Fever portrays these very concerns.

When emotional stakes and investments are so high, it is difficult to accept the complicated desires of bisexuality or interracial attractions without responding. Thus, the community will often respond to such "abandonment" with moral denunciation, frequently combined with social exclusion and emotional rejection. A community centered on identity politics that has relatively weak institutions of public life (compared with the larger hegemonic culture) tends to rely on such psychological defenses.

Those who envision a multicultural society assume that this society will recognize and accept very different cultural norms, social needs, and forms of social interaction. This imagined society is not the one invoked with the image of the melting pot; this early-twentieth-century metaphor was used to dispel the fears of native-born U.S. whites that the hordes of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe would not overwhelm their way of life. Nevertheless, the melting pot image does have a lot of validity; it reflects the ability of powerful institutions such as the educational system and the mass media to socialize second-generation immigrants into the hegemonic values of white American society. The vision of a multicultural society must rest on a belief that some of these powerful homogenizing forces can be neutralized. A politics of identity emerged in the first place to defend the values and needs of stigmatized or oppressed communities from the enormous power of these homogenizing institutions.

One major limitation of identity politics and its representation in multiculturalism is that we are all born within a web of overlapping identities and group affiliations.^[8] Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa explored this experience in the anthology they edited, This Bridge Called My Back . More recently Norma Alarcon exemplified their perspective in three sentences: "We are colored in a white feminist movement. We

are the feminists among the people of our culture. We are often lesbians among the straight." This Bridge Called My Back remains a model for clarifying some of the dilemmas of multiculturalism.^[9]

Although the women who contributed to the anthology have varied attitudes toward identity politics, many of the authors remain aware that they are inextricably at the nexus of several identity discourses. Bridge implicitly critiques a politics of unity based on any single dimension, such as gender, race, class, or sexual identity, and demonstrates that the self is multiple. Many of the writers in Bridge have continued to explore this terrain in hybrid literary forms combining poetry, essay, memoir, and drama.^[10] Moraga in Loving in the War Years , Anzaldúa in Borderlands , and Audre Lorde in Zami all incorporate what Bakhtin called "heteroglossia"—dialogue between different cultural voices.^[11]

Moraga, Lorde, Anzaldúa, Alarcon, and many other authors writing from the perspective of "bridge" identities recognize that identity is not the result of an isolated community's discourse but the interaction of people bound to each other in many different ways. The self takes it shape from a continuous process of discourse and communication—between people of different races, genders, classes, generations, social roles, and sexualities. People with multiple loyalties can only be meaningfully included in their communities through public dialogue.

The work of British-Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi explores the contradictions and possibilities of this terrain. In his essay about the contradictions of his own complex identity, he criticizes conservative philosopher Roger Scrution's justification of racism's "illiberal sentiments" as nothing more than the desire for "the company of one's kind."^[12] Kureishi writes:

What a feeble, bloodless, narrow conception of human relationships and the possibilities of love and communication. … One does seek the company of one's kind. … But the idea that these are the only people one can get along with or identify with … leads to the denigration of those unlike oneself. It leads to the idea that others have less humanity than oneself or one's own group or "kind"; and to the idea of the Enemy, of the alien, of the Other. As Baldwin says: "this inevitably leads to murder."^[13]

Another Country: Representation And The Transformation Of The Public Sphere

Living on the boundaries of different communities and finding oneself within overlapping identities makes one see how inadequate the existing forms of political and cultural representation are. Cultural forms have shown certain possibilities of sophistication—as Moraga's plays, Anzaldúa's and Lorde's essays, and Kureishi's films illustrate—but it is not clear how to represent complex identities politically.

Most of the cultural institutions in the United States (television, universities, and the recording industry, for example) are still governed by traditional schemas of representation, which limit the number and kind of minority communities represented. Unfortunately, these institutions remain indispensable instruments for producing ideas and legitimating practices. This holds true whether they offer a fictional representation of everyday life, as with television dramas and situation comedies, or whether they are the major institutions in our society that legitimate knowledge, as with universities.

Overall, the electronic media dominate American public life through the talk show (Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, Ted Koppel) and the news magazine–format show (Sixty Minutes , the Today show, Fresh Air ). The public life reflected in book and magazine publishing and in the university reaches a smaller, select audience. Publishing and academia are also more permeable and less monolithic than the electronic media. Despite these differences, the global media conglomerates (for example, Pearson PLC (Penguin Putnam), Viacom, Bertelmanns, Murdoch's News Corporation, Walt Disney Co., Time-Warner, and Sony) and the universities function together to frame public discourse in American life.^[14] Nevertheless, significant and lively debate also takes place in the communities excluded from mainstream U.S. public life. It is often these communities that have been galvanized by the politics of identity.

The politicization of personal and collective identities is the basis for several significant changes in the characteristics of public debate. The new "multicultural" public sphere demands representation in the form

of speakers, political delegates, cultural figures, and role models. Most of the communities that have adopted identity politics—for example, the Chicano, African American, lesbian and gay, and feminist communities—are underrepresented in positions of power and visibility relative to their proportions in the population. Increasingly, members of these communities insist on access to the institutions of public discourse, such as television, radio, universities, publishing, movies, and music.

The adequacy of representation in cultural forms is also a contested issue. There is still an abundance of stereotypes, invidious narrative conventions (for example, the homosexual who dies in the story), inauthentic language (using terms such as "fellatio" rather than "sucking cock" in safe-sex literature aimed at street hustlers), and value-laden metaphors ("innocent victims" for people who were infected with HIV through blood transfusions rather than sexual activity or intravenous drug use). One hopes that more complex and sophisticated representations of stigmatized or excluded communities will go a long way toward reducing the distorted communications that currently exist between mainstream U.S. society and marginalized communities.

Probably the most highly publicized effect of identity politics on public discourse is the notion of "politically correct" speech. Most communities have the used the term "politically correct" for years in an ironic and self-deprecatory way. Fundamentally, it implied an awareness that community members had residual feelings and opinions that conflicted with their ostensible political identities. In addition, the term implicitly acknowledged the value of political etiquette. Community members used "political correctness" ironically because they had long experienced political moralism (on the Left and in the women's movement), as well as strong community pressures to conform.^[15] Thus, jokes about political incorrectness marked either emotional ambivalence or quiet disagreement with prevailing political attitudes.

Recently, conservatives and the mass media have taken up the term "political correctness" and used it to attack the Left. They have called politically correct speech the "new McCarthyism." Although conservatives

appear to be targeting the political moralism that actually does characterize many forms of identity politics, they intend their campaign against political correctness and the cultural Left to close down the debate about the very issues of representation that multiculturalism raises.

Representation poses a problem even within movements committed to multiculturalism. In the public life of the lesbian and gay communities, the issues of multicultural representation are widely discussed. There are good reasons that multicultural representation is such an active issue within these communities. Almost no lesbian or gay man is raised in a family of other homosexuals. Instead, most lesbians and gay men enter the homosexual community through self-conscious choices that they make as adults. The lesbian and gay communities consist of men and women who leave, even if only temporarily, the cultures of their primary socialization to engage in sexual, political, or social activities in a different community. To function effectively, the lesbian and gay communities must acknowledge their participants' diverse cultural backgrounds. Of course, this process is neither automatic nor conflict-free.

Questions of representation regularly arose among the planners of OutWrite '91 and '92, the national lesbian and gay writers' conferences that OUT/LOOK magazine sponsored. For a long time, the publishing industry has clearly favored white males over women, people of color, or sexual minorities as authors. Conference organizers wanted to honor pioneering homosexual authors (the majority of whom have been white men), but this desire sometimes clashed with the explicit commitment to recognize contemporary writers from communities of color or with previously marginalized experiences (such as writers from the S/M or transgender communities).^[16]

Aspiring to have a conference that adequately represents the real and complex diversity of the lesbian and gay communities quite legitimately creates an endless process of negotiation. Because there are so many different and conflicting perspectives, conference planners will inevitably fall short of full inclusion. Among the many communities that the planning committee of OutWrite '92 sought to represent were

ethnic and racial communities such as Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans; sexual minorities such as bisexuals, transsexuals, and S/M; people with AIDS; and lesbian and gay writers from Latin America and Canada. Some communities were represented by specific panels, whereas others were represented on several different panels. Of course, we did not always succeed in adequately representing every perspective or community. Defining the appropriate representation often poses new questions. For example, our commitment to representing people of color on all panels raised interesting questions for the panel on Jewish writing—in addition to having Ashkenazim, should we encourage the presence of Sephardim, or Jews from the Middle East or Africa?

As Louise Sloan wrote in the Bay Guardian when she reported on the conference, "One thing that became very clear … is that speaking for anyone else or claiming any community as absolutely one's own are highly problematic, if not impossible undertakings." Also, as that realization implies, there is no "universal" point of view that rises above the multicultural diversity of perspectives.^[17]

Identity politics as we practice it in this country is competitive—partly because different communities are vying for limited space in public life. At each new level of political mobilization, we must proliferate identities to guarantee further representation. This competitive struggle for representation undercuts the multicultural project.

Although writers such as Moraga, Anzaldúa, Lorde, Kureishi, and Baldwin have developed more adequate models of cultural representation, the forms of political representation remain deep in crisis. There is still minimal representation of women, people of color, homosexuals, and other marginalized groups within our major political institutions. It is time to work out forms of multicultural coalition politics that do not rely only on the existing formulas of representation.

We need public dialogue, with all its attendant risks, so that we can create a multicultural political project. As Bernice Reagon says, "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'"^[18] Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project.

Making Dialogue Possible

No vision of a multicultural society is viable without a commitment to dialogue—candid and engaged, risky and painful, but ideally thoughtful and fair. Dialogue is only the first step in sharing public life. It is not the same thing as an exchange of power, and it is not the only necessary form of political agency. Dialogue, however, helps individuals modify their political understandings without force or violence.

The multicultural project can provide a new model of representation only if we are responsive to people from other cultural communities—if we can give up some of the rigid boundaries that differentiate social identities and become permeable selves. This openness is what makes the public discussion of politically tense questions so risky and personally frightening. The risk for individuals is worthwhile, however, because of the benefits for the community. Public discussion offers a form of social objectivity and makes the participants accountable to the communities engaged.

Inequalities of power threaten every attempt to establish the social conditions of dialogue. We should not see these inequalities as insurmountable obstacles, however; they mean that we should try to redistribute power within the public sphere. One step toward reducing power inequalities is to create institutions that consciously embody multicultural ideals—that is, cultural intermediaries such as alternative publishing houses, journals, and conferences.^[19]

The intensity and bitterness of many debates involving multiculturalism have exposed the participants' emotional, cultural, and political vulnerability. Those who have been excluded from public feel vulnerable when they publicly express the anger and pain of their exclusion from the dominant culture. Ironically, those who were raised within the hegemonic WASP culture also experience vulnerability when they relinquish privileges and power; it is painful for them to lose emotionally significant forms of expression.

This social and psychological vulnerability underlies our fear of public debate on the shape of multicultural society. Much of the reaction to political correctness stems from the pain that people on all sides of

the question have experienced. Every participant enters the public arena with differing degrees of power and privilege. Those who come from communities that are represented in mainstream public life or those who have traditionally had greater access to political and cultural institutions must enter the dialogue prepared to treat other perspectives as equal.

To create a multicultural public sphere in which dialogue can take place, people should take the following social and psychological guidelines into account:

The debate about multiculturalism has been emotionally painful, partly because it challenges the cultural basis of one's sense of self-worth, and partly because the social stakes are high. We are battling

over the terms of inclusion and exclusion in American life. The psychological vulnerability that most of us have felt in the debate on multiculturalism makes the conflicts over representation increasingly futile and bitter. There are no widely accepted political frameworks that will help us resolve these questions. By itself, dialogue is not the answer, but we must have dialogue and debate so that we can develop a coalition on the Left. This coalition will provide a basis for social inclusion, cultural autonomy, and political solidarity.

10
Reflections On Queer Nationwith Allan Bérubé

A new generation of activists is here. They have come out into communities devastated by the HIV epidemic and into political consciousness through the struggle against AIDS. But AIDS is not their main focus.

This new generation calls itself queer , not lesbian, gay, and bisexual —awkward, narrow, and perhaps compromised words. Queer is meant to be confrontational—opposed to gay assimilationists and straight oppressors while inclusive of people who have been marginalized by anyone in power. Queer Nationals are undertaking an awesome task. They

are trying to combine contradictory impulses: to bring together people who have been made to feel perverse, queer, odd, outcast, different and deviant, and to affirm sameness by defining a common identity on the fringes. They are inclusive, but within boundaries that threaten to marginalize those whose difference doesn't conform to the new nation. These contradictions are locked in the name Queer Nation:

QUEER = DIFFERENCE
NATION = SAMENESS

Queer Nation meetings are thick with tensions—tensions between consensus, with its attention to marginalized minorities, conflicts with the temptation of majority rule, with its efficiency in getting things done, tensions between taking sharply defined political positions and establishing an open forum for imaginative tactics and free discussion. Queer Nationals are torn between affirming a new identity—"I am queer"—and rejecting restrictive identities—"I reject your categories," between rejecting assimilation—"I don't need your approval, just get out of my face"—and wanting to be recognized by mainstream society—"We queers are gonna get in your face."

Queer nationalism's actions play on the politics of cultural subversion: theatrical demonstrations, infiltrations of shopping malls and straight bars, kiss-ins and be-ins. Rather than a strategic politics that confronts powerful institutions directly or uses lobbying and electoral campaigns to bring about change, Queer Nation takes to the street wearing "QUEER " stickers and badges on their jackets, fighting to keep queer turf safe from bashings. At times, they look like queer urban street gangs.

These queers are constructing a new culture and identity by combining old and new elements that don't usually go together. They may be the first wave of activists to embrace retrofuture/classic contemporary styles of postmodernism. They are building their identity from old and new elements—borrowing styles and tactics from popular culture, communities of color, hippies, AIDS activists, the antinuclear movement,

MTV, feminists, and early gay liberationists. Their new culture is slick, quick, anarchic, transgressive, ironic. They are dead serious, but they also just wanna have fun. If they manage not to blow up in contradiction or get bogged down in the process, they may lead the way into new forms of activism for the 1990s.

11
Culture Wars And Identity Politics
The Religious Right and the Cultural Politics of Homosexuality

Since the 1970s,^[1] American political and cultural life has become polarized between secular liberalism—increasingly identified with multiculturalism, pluralism, and the politics of diversity—and religious conservatism.^[2] The Religious Right is engaged in a campaign to achieve political and cultural hegemony in American life, and it has built this campaign on the revival of supposedly traditional "family values." Homosexuality is currently a major target of this hegemonic project.

Gay and lesbian activists have long sought acceptance within a liberal framework of tolerance and equal treatment. They have modeled

this quest on the black civil rights movement and the assimilation of other ethnic groups. I will argue that the framework of this "ethnic model" (increasingly characterized as "identity politics") is too limited to mobilize the cultural and political resources necessary to defeat the Religious Right's agenda. Existing alternatives modeled on AIDS activism and queer politics can supplement but not replace identity politics. The only strategy that offers reasonable hope is a radical democratic politics that appeals to the disorganized bloc of Americans who remain opposed to conservative orthodoxy.

The culture wars of the last decade originated in the battles of the 1960s and 1970s: the black civil rights and black power movements, protests against the Vietnam War, the counterculture, the sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, and the emergence of the gay and lesbian movements. Each of these movements encountered resistance from a broad body of Americans. The spread of black civil rights activity made a growing number of whites aware of their own racism. The antiwar movement flew in the face of those who believed that communism threatened the American way of life. The counterculture disseminated its powerful brew of drugs, sex, and rock music to young people across the country.^[3]

By the mid-1970s, the energies that fed these movements had begun to wane. Black political movements, such as the civil rights movement, Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers, were increasingly the targets of violent responses—the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Black communities rioted in response to long-standing injustices and antiblack violence. Although the social struggles of the 1960s reinvigorated the Left, which reached its peak in the early 1970s, the 1976 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam eliminated a major source of discontent—one which had fueled the leftist movement.

Among the movements that emerged from the political struggles of the 1960s, three continued to grow throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. The environmental movement has had an enormous impact. Both the women's movement and the gay rights movement also flourished throughout the 1970s, making more and more people aware of issues such as the ERA, abortion, and gay rights. The AIDS epidemic aroused new political energies in the gay and lesbian community.^[4]

Originally, the conservatives who opposed the movements of the 1960s and 1970s formed an amorphous group; they had no coherent identity. Political leaders and intellectuals sought to organize this conservative opposition. They called it, among other things, "the silent majority." The Religious Right began to participate in American politics during the 1970s.^[5] With Reagan's election in 1980, the New Right that emerged victorious was an alliance of traditional conservatives primarily preoccupied with communism and economic issues and religious fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell.^[6]

For many on the Right, multiculturalism is replacing communism as the evil force currently threatening "the American way of life." In 1993, Irving Kristol, the so-called Godfather of American conservatism, wrote, "There is no 'after the Cold War' for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. … Now that the other 'Cold War' is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global Communist threat."^[7] This new "cold war" is a political-cultural struggle over the shape of American democracy.

In the 1970s, conservative opposition to this peculiar conflation of "liberalism" and the descendants of the counterculture increasingly found common ground in the "family values" agenda. Targeting anything that seemed to challenge the idealized nuclear family, this agenda appeals to many Americans who feel strained by conjugal commitments and who fear a loss of authority over their children. Drugs, violence in the schools, the social dominance of television, and particularly the risks of teenage sexuality (for example, pregnancy and AIDS) lurk as threats to their children.^[8] Conservatives use family values as the basis for both religious proselytizing and political mobilizing (including fundraising, lobbying, and electoral politics). The Right has placed their family values agenda at the cultural center of their hegemonic project and have supplemented it with other planks of conservative ideology, such as dismantling the welfare state, privatizing public services, reviving prayer in the schools, adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, and reinstituting the death penalty.

The Religious Right's "Gay Agenda"

Abortion has been one of the most divisive social issues in American politics. As the linchpin of women's reproductive rights, it is intimately connected with a whole range of other issues (such as sex education, teenage pregnancy, and distributing condoms to teenagers) that assume the individual's freedom of sexual choice. The abortion issue has united fundamentalists across the spectrum—from Roman Catholicism, Protestant fundamentalism, and Orthodox Judaism. The conservative antiabortion movement has waged an extremely confrontational and even violent war against abortion clinics and doctors who perform abortions. Although a large minority (20 percent) of the American population opposes abortion on moral grounds, most Americans reject government interference in women's reproductive rights. The fundamentalists' momentum in the battle against abortion has stalemated. Thus, the Religious Right has turned to the other key plank in its crusade to shore up "family values"—the defeat of gay and lesbian rights.

The growing visibility of the lesbian and gay community throughout the 1970s forced conservative fundamentalists to take notice of homosexuality. Fundamentalist churches felt compelled to assert that the Judeo-Christian tradition views homosexuals as "sodomites" who engage in "unnatural practices." Fundamentalists also viewed homosexuality as one of a number of threats to the traditional nuclear family. Christian fundamentalists launched their first electoral campaign against gay rights in 1977; Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" crusade aimed to repeal gay rights legislation in Dade County, Florida.

The Religious Right's project to reconstitute traditional Christian values in American culture is increasingly dominant. It has had an enormous effect on the mass media, it has captured the Republican Party, and it swayed many voters in the 1994 elections. By the mid-1990s, gay issues became the one social issue—even more than abortion—that most polarizes the American electorate. Homosexuals are now the primary target of many fundamentalist organizing activities.

Can gay and lesbian political organizations meet that challenge? Do lesbians and gay men have the cultural and symbolic resources to organize

an effective political strategy? Identity politics as a type of political mobilization cannot defeat the Religious Right's agenda—nor can politics modeled on AIDS activism or queer nationalism replace identity politics. Lesbians and gay men need a new political strategy—one more far-reaching—to combat the Religious Right's project.

Civil Rights, Identity Politics, And Community Economic Development

At the end of the 1960s, gay political activity exploded in the wake of the Stonewall riots.^[9] Publicly declaring one's homosexuality was the decisive innovation of the post-Stonewall gay and lesbian liberation movement. This "coming-out strategy" demonstrated that there was a sizable group of people engaged in primarily homosexual behavior. Gay and lesbian political organizers gained an identifiable population, one could almost say a "quantifiable" goal, which provided the basis for residential and economic community building and political mobilization in the form of demonstrations, marches, and voting. "Coming out of the closet" became the essential precondition for gay and lesbian political advancement.

Early homophile (the term adopted by the pre-Stonewall homosexual civil rights movement) activists had never even conceived of a coming-out strategy before. Many homosexuals in the period prior to Stonewall tended to think of their homosexuality as only one component of their identities. In that spirit, Gore Vidal has always insisted that "homosexual" is an adjective, not a noun. In effect, however, coming out as a political-cultural strategy has tended to reify homosexual identities, although it also initiated a public discursive process of identification.^[10] Stigmatization and repression contributed to this reification of homosexual identity. The gay and lesbian movement's emphasis on coming out, nevertheless, did not totally dismantle the closet. Nor did it spontaneously cause the stigma or repressive laws to disappear.

The publicness of the new homosexual identity encouraged new forms of community building and organizing. Openly lesbian and gay

activists demonstrated in public places for increased tolerance and civil rights, particularly in housing and employment. As the number of gay and lesbian political organizations proliferated, lesbians and gay men created businesses to supply their communities with news and literature (newspapers, publishers, and bookstores), consumer goods (clothing, jewelry, and sexual commodities), meeting places (coffee houses, restaurants, and bathhouses), and social services (psychological counseling centers). Gay neighborhoods formed around the old pre-Stonewall sexual zones, bars, and community-owned businesses. The economic development would have been impossible without the discursive reconstruction of homosexual identity based on coming out.

Ironically, this strategy allowed many members of the lesbian and gay communities to be public about their homosexuality in limited ways. They were able to remain in the closet at work or with their families, but they could be "out" in the protected environment of urban gay enclaves. The heightened visibility of the community protected individual members. It was not necessary for everyone who engaged in homosexual behavior to come out unequivocally. The visibility possible in the lesbian and gay communities and the economic development provided a framework in which homosexuals could identify as lesbian or gay without paying the price of full public disclosure.

As lesbian- and gay-owned small businesses flourished, gay and lesbian political activity drew on this community development. The formation of Gay Democratic Clubs and their success in local elections reinforced the process of community development—a process that was jointly discursive and economic. Harvey Milk's 1976 election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors represented, in part, the consolidation of the Castro district as a gay neighborhood; many small business owners in the community had financed his campaign.^[11]

Once the coming-out strategy unleashed the potentialities of gay and lesbian economic development, the community stratified economically along the lines of class, race, and gender—just as in mainstream American society. This division limited the political and cultural possibilities of those who did not or were not able to participate in the predominantly white, middle-class, and male enclaves.

Whatever economic development occurred by the late 1970s had never been equitably balanced between lesbians and gay men. As women, lesbians had many fewer economic resources at their disposal than gay men. Lesbians and gay men had also specialized in different kinds of businesses and had often lived in different neighborhoods. Lesbian political developments created different economic priorities; lesbian community building and economic development reflected different needs and agendas. In the mid- to late 1970s, lesbians entered a separatist phase, partly in an effort to build women's communities and businesses, and partly because gay men were no less chauvinist than straight ones.^[12] Homosexual women and men began to share a political and economic community in response to a series of outside threats—the right-wing initiatives to erase gay rights legislation, which began in 1977, and the AIDS crisis, which started in the early 1980s.

These economic and political developments did not fully include homosexuals of color. It has been primarily white gay men and lesbians who have settled in gay neighborhoods and owned businesses serving the community. Lesbians and gay men of color often reside in their ethnic or racial neighborhoods. Gay people of color must commute to the gay community districts in order to participate in the gay community—and they often encounter discrimination.

The development of gay and lesbian identity politics results from the combined effects of discursive identification and economic development. Discursive identification occurs through the process of coming out and requires cultural reinforcements, such as "the coming-out novel" as a genre, the use of lesbian or gay consumer goods, residence in a lesbian or gay neighborhood, and participation on lesbian softball teams or in gay choirs. The community's small businesses supply those cultural reinforcements in the form of commodities. Discursive identification and economic development are inseparable elements in the history of the post-Stonewall homosexual community.

The joint play of these elements has encouraged some political leaders to think of the gay and lesbian community as an "ethnic group." This trope enables those leaders to situate gay and lesbian identity politics in American political history. Lesbians and gay men follow in the

footsteps of the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, and Scandinavians—the construction of communities, political machines, and eventually "assimilation."

What disrupts this comfortable perspective, however, is that some members of the lesbian and gay community are not easily assimilated. Those deviant members include: homosexuals of color, kindred sexual minorities such as the leather community, bisexuals and other sexual perverts, and those resisting the norms of gender conformity, such as drag queens, transgendered people, and transsexuals. The irony is that communities using identity politics both resist assimilation (by insisting that their identities are each different) and strive for assimilation (by claiming that their identities are compatible with those of other American groups).

The gay and lesbian community's identity politics, built on economic-cultural foundations resembling the classic American ethnic model, cannot offer an effective political response to the Religious Right's hegemonic project of reconstituting family values as an official American ideology. If the Right characterizes homosexuals as morally corrupt and irresponsible, as wealthier and better educated than the average American, adopting a fortress mentality only to protect existing economic and cultural enclaves could potentially isolate the lesbian and gay communities.^[13]

The Aids Crisis: The Breakdown Of Identity Politics

As the 1980s progressed, the gay and lesbian community increasingly realized the devastating impact of AIDS on gay men. Fostered by the economic-cultural "ethnic model" of community development, gay and lesbian identity politics was unable to cope with this situation.

The complex of diseases called AIDS was first discovered among gay men in 1981. From the first moment the gay male community became aware of AIDS (which was first called GRID—gay-related immune deficiency), it responded politically. By the end of the summer in 1981,

a group of gay men had already met at author Larry Kramer's apartment in New York City and had established the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)—the largest AIDS organization in the country today.^[14]

In the late 1970s, homosexuals had been under attack from the Religious Right and other conservatives. Lesbian and gay communities had just barely fought off conservative attacks not only in Dade County, Florida, but also in St. Paul, Minnesota; Eugene, Oregon; and statewide in California with Proposition 6. In the midst of these campaigns, a disgruntled conservative politician assassinated Harvey Milk. When Milk's murderer was convicted of manslaughter and received a light sentence, San Francisco's gay community erupted in a riot outside City Hall.^[15]

Gay activists realized that an epidemic of a fatal, sexually transmitted disease originating in the gay male community was politically explosive. People might take drastic political action against the gay community. Homophobic conservatives could demonize homosexuals and promulgate an antisexual morality. Doctors initially advised gay men to stop having sex. In addition, it soon became apparent that the public health authorities were less responsive to the epidemic than had been the case in previous fatal outbreaks, such as Legionnaires' disease in Philadelphia in 1976.

As the number of deaths in the gay community skyrocketed, the inadequate response of federal and local authorities provoked increasing despair and anger.^[16] Soon, gay men banded together to try to deal with the epidemic more effectively. Even before the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) itself was discovered, the epidemiological evidence suggested that the disease was probably transmitted through blood and sperm. Groups of activists in New York and San Francisco focused on education as a way to retard the epidemic. They developed safe-sex guidelines and established organizations to circulate information about the epidemic and counsel people who feared exposure.^[17]

The epidemic's dimensions seemed to expand enormously. It affected other communities, such as Haitians, African Americans, hemophiliacs, the recipients of blood transfusions, and intravenous drug users. The incubation period seemed to be growing longer. The gay

community's own organizing efforts, important and valuable though they were, fell far short of what was required with an epidemic of such huge proportions.

It became increasingly clear that a more forceful political response was needed. In the fall of 1987, activists formed ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York. Soon afterward, they organized groups in cities across the country. ACT UP revitalized a style of radical political activity that had flourished in the early days of the gay liberation movement. Grassroots and confrontational, it had a flair for imaginative tactics that captured media attention.^[18] ACT UP demanded that the Food and Drug Administration accelerate the approval of AIDS drugs, that pharmaceutical firms lower drug prices, and that the National Institutes of Health expand its research on AIDS. In addition, ACT UP attacked public indifference, which hindered AIDS education and enabled employers, landlords, and insurance companies to discriminate against people with AIDS.

The growing impact of AIDS on the American population forced activists to broaden their constituency. ACT UP groups around the country primarily consisted of gay white men, but the need to reflect AIDS's epidemiology and to build alliances with other communities affected by AIDS led to a politics that strived to be more inclusive and more open to building coalitions. It was never a smooth process. Various communities affected by AIDS sometimes had little else in common. Some of the groups were also socially stigmatized and had even fewer resources than the gay community. Occasionally, they had segments who voiced their discomfort with or disapproval of homosexuality. When it came to matters of strategy, AIDS activists even had increasing conflicts with gay and lesbian political elites within the community over political priorities.^[19]

The politics of AIDS activism forced gay and lesbian activists to have increased interaction with federal, state, and local governments, thereby transforming the lesbian and gay community's relation with the state. Community-based organizations received government funding and participated in policymaking to a much greater extent than ever before. The AIDS movement has had a significant impact on government research,

public health policies, and government funding of treatment, care, and education. This government funding has created large-scale institutions with jobs and career possibilities that did not exist in the lesbian and gay communities before the epidemic.

These economic and institutional developments have had two major effects on the gay and lesbian communities. First, they have encouraged lesbian and gay political institutions to engage more with other communities, governmental agencies, and mainstream institutions. Second, they have transformed the class structure of gay and lesbian leadership. The new jobs and career possibilities attracted a generation of leaders who were upwardly mobile and educated at elite universities and colleges. In the past, gay men such as this might have pursued conventional careers. Now, though, many of them were infected with the virus that causes AIDS and took up AIDS activism to fight for their lives. The older generation of leaders had chosen gay political life as an alternative to mainstream careers. Very early on in the epidemic, however, AIDS devastated the founding generation both physically and emotionally. A new generation soon displaced the older one.

AIDS had decimated the gay male community, had forced it to reach out to other communities, and had seriously undermined its economic and cultural self-sufficiency. The countervailing pressures of gay and lesbian identity politics and of AIDS activism produced a political situation that required a new perspective—one that conceived of identity as stable, but also recognized the incredible diversity within the community. The perspective needed to account for the kinship of all sexual minorities and the range of possible gender roles, ethnic, and racial identities. In this moment, Queer Nation was born.

Queer Politics And Cultural Radicalism

Lesbian and gay identity politics was grounded in an appeal to liberal beliefs in equal treatment and tolerance. The Right, however, has always attacked civil rights for lesbians and gay men—whether through the antigay initiatives in 1976 and 1977 or with the siege that began in

1991 and continues today. Neither the increasing numbers and growth of visible gay and lesbian communities in most major U.S. cities nor the increasing size of a measurable lesbian and gay electorate nor the opening up of a lucrative gay market for major brand-name consumer products has seemed to contribute to the acceptance of homosexuals in American life.

Because many other activists felt frustrated that lesbian and gay identity politics could not achieve even the liberal benefits of tolerance and equal treatment and that AIDS activism had diluted gay and lesbian concerns, a new movement called Queer Nation emerged in the spring of 1990.^[20] After a wave of homophobic violence occurred in New York City, Queer Nation formed, growing out of a demonstration against the violence. A broadside at the protest that announced "I Hate Straights" inspired the group.^[21] It brought together many people who had been active in ACT UP New York and who felt frustrated by compromises on gay issues during coalition work. Queer Nation groups soon sprang up across the United States.

Queer Nation spurred new tactics and revived the politics of visibility. In his column in the New York–based magazine Outweek , AIDS activist and journalist Michelangelo Signorile introduced a new tactic called "outing," which extended the coming-out strategy of the early gay movement. Whereas coming out had been a voluntary personal and political act that contributed to lesbian and gay visibility, outing was a political agenda to expose closeted homosexuals who were famous or politically conservative. Outing was a punishment for remaining in the closet—and many activists thought it particularly appropriate to expose gay men or lesbians on the Right.^[22]

Queer Nation was an openly militant challenge to the identity politics of the lesbian and gay communities. It rejected the traditional liberal goals of equal treatment and tolerance, criticizing those ideals as assimilationist. "We're here, we're queer, get used to it," was one of its slogans. The name "Queer Nation" brought together an extremely complicated notion of identity. By adopting the term "queer," it expanded the definition of the community that it sought to represent; Queer Nation embraced anyone who differed from the white heterosexual norm,

such as lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals, transgendered people, and sexual perverts, especially if members of these groups had hybrid identities of class, race, and ethnicity. By calling themselves a "nation," queer activists appealed to an exclusive sort of nationalism, almost a separatism. Thus, queer activists sought to combine seemingly contradictory notions of difference and identity into "an oxymoronic community of difference."^[23]

Most of the Queer Nation groups have since ceased to exist. Their contradictory mission caused them to founder. Yet queer politics remains a normative ideal, and queer theory has emerged in academia to focus on the cultural impact of normalized heterosexuality.^[24]

Potentially, queer politics will help keep gay and lesbian identity politics honest about the diversity of racial and sexual differences and their significance. Queer politics can also help forge links between lesbian and gay politics and the broad agenda of multiculturalism. Queer politics, however, cannot serve as a basis for fighting the Religious Right about issues such as AIDS education and funding, gay-positive school curricula, or civil rights because queer politics cannot advance the community's engagement with the state or provide the institutional and economic resources necessary to overcome opponents.^[25] In contrast, lesbian and gay identity politics and AIDS activism have provided those benefits. The lesbian and gay communities must win over a broad spectrum of the American population; the Religious Right will ask that same segment of people to support the repeal of already existing laws and to limit social tolerance. None of the existing political models that lesbians and gay men have developed are adequate, either separately or together. Activists need to devise a new strategy.

Family Values, Gay Rights, And Radical Democracy

The Religious Right's ambitious project to make the ideology of "family values" hegemonic violates long-standing American political beliefs. The campaign seeks to subvert the separation of church and state and

to mobilize class resentments against lesbians and gay men. Ironically, the class structure of the homosexual community does not differ significantly from that of American society as a whole. The lesbian and gay community can oppose this project only by expanding the narrow focus of identity politics or by shifting its emphasis away from queer politics. The gay movement should aim to participate in a radical democratic project with other communities and groups.^[26]

The Religious Right began its campaign against homosexuality with an antihomosexual interpretation of biblical texts. Now, it also portrays homosexuality as a social cause of the breakdown of the family. The Religious Right disapproves of open homosexuality because it implies a nonreproductive sexuality; fundamentalists see procreative sexuality as the basis of the family, so homosexuality appears to be a rejection of the family. When young people come out, it demonstrates that families have no control over youthful sexuality. The Religious Right interprets homosexuality in "moral" terms—as a choice to defy religious laws.

On one level, religious fundamentalists have a right to think whatever they want. Lesbians and gay men object to the Religious Right, however, because it is disseminating inaccurate information. Apart from differing over interpretations of biblical and religious texts, lesbians and gay men do not feel that they choose, by and large, to be homosexual. The Right's religious injunctions cause enormous (and unnecessary) pain to those whose families believe that homosexuality is sinful and evil. Homosexuals are not inherently unethical or evil people. Therefore, homosexuality should not be the basis for stigmatization, discrimination, or abuse against a significant minority in our multicultural and multireligious society.

These intellectual and ethical differences would not have any political significance if the Religious Right were not tapping into homophobia to garner support for changing laws and public policies. The Religious Right has adopted two basic approaches to achieve its goals. Lesbian activist and lawyer Nan Hunter has identified the two different types of campaigns as either "No Promo Homo" or "No Special Rights."^[27]

The "No Promo Homo" strategy strives to ensure that it is illegal to promote the tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality. For religious fundamentalists, this translates into "the promotion of homosexuality." Many of the most bitterly fought campaigns against lesbians and gay men illustrate this tactic. The other strategy is to argue that homosexuals need no "special" legal protections, that society does not discriminate against homosexuals. To supplement this argument, fundamentalists usually appeal to class resentment by adding that gay men and lesbians are wealthier and better educated than most Americans and therefore do not need "special" protections. Both of these political strategies draw on the large pool of homophobia that Americans already have.

Both strategies also appeal to populist sentiments, to long-standing American beliefs among even liberal and nonreligious people. Americans distrust "proselytizing" and fear that lesbians and gays will try to "convert" other people. Suspicion of proselytizing was the basis for the separation of church and state in the Bill of Rights. Americans also resent underground minorities who have economic power and who are not completely visible.

The appeal is ironic precisely because the Religious Right's tactics actually violate each of these beliefs. It proselytizes continually. The "No Promo Homo" campaigns infringe on the separation of church and state; the Religious Right is attempting to turn fundamentalist Christian beliefs into law.

The "No Special Rights" campaigns, of course, obscure the fact that openly gay men and women suffer discrimination and denigration. They usually earn less than their counterparts by age and occupation.^[28] The Religious Right and their conservative allies have dramatically shifted the distribution of wealth so that less than 10 percent of the population has almost 50 percent of the money.

This implies that gay and lesbian political strategies should focus more on the separation of church and state and on economic issues. With these issues, activists can relate the more narrow political interests of the lesbian and gay communities to the concerns of the rest of the country. AIDS activists have used that strategy, promoting the needs

of people with AIDS by arguing that the whole country would benefit from national health insurance. As Michael Nava and Robert Dawidoff have argued in their eloquent and forceful book, "Americans will have to recognize their gay family, friends, and neighbors as fellow citizens to protect their own individual freedom, not to mention traditional American democratic pluralism."^[29]

The lesbian and gay movement can adopt two broad political strategies to combat the Religious Right's hegemonic project. One strategy, proposed by Bruce Bawer, Marshall Kirk, Hunter Madsen, and other gay conservatives (or "moderates" as they wish to be called), would require a major reconstruction of gay and lesbian politics, in particular a rejection of the "ethnic model" or identity politics. This "moderate" strategy focuses on redressing "the ignorance that makes straight people fear homosexuality and consider it a threat to American society."^[30] Bawer and his associates wish to embark on an educational and public relations campaign—partly to undo the negative effects of the gay subculture's radicalism and flamboyance, but mostly because they fail to understand how the Religious Right's hegemonic political project deliberately employs false and misleading representations and violates basic political guarantees such as the separation of church and state.

A more realistic—but incredibly difficult—political strategy is to follow in the footsteps of the Rainbow Coalition. The gay and lesbian movement would work with political groups from other communities—racial and ethnic minorities, the economically disadvantaged—to create a radical democratic politics.

Currently, the Rainbow Coalition is moribund—many of its constituent movements fragmented, tensions between groups remained unresolved, and it may have been tied too closely to Jesse Jackson's candidacy. Such a radical democratic coalition must nevertheless be revived in order to counter the Religious Right. Lesbian and gay political leaders must not wait for others to take the initiative—they must reach out to other communities and build coalitions.

No coalition politics will ever succeed without a concomitant learning process. This means that the lesbian and gay communities must be willing to learn about issues important to other coalition members and

to incorporate that knowledge into their political common sense. Other members must do the same. The lesbian and gay movement, as well as other currents on the Left, must also reach out to and work with churches and religious groups in the progressive religious tradition.^[31]

It is important to recognize that although the Religious Right wants to keep homosexuality at bay, it also intends to use the issue of gay and lesbian rights to destroy "liberalism," which many conservatives identify with "multiculturalism." Protecting liberal gains such as civil rights legislation and Medicare is an important component of the radical democratic project. The lesbian and gay movement will only defeat the Religious Right in its hegemonic ambitions if it can join with its allies to provide a counterhegemonic project—a radical democracy that is open, pluralistic, and practical.

Conclusion
Meditations in an Emergency

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
ANTONIO GRAMSCI , The Prison Notebooks

The "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
WALTER BENJAMIN , "Theses on the Philosophy of History "

In May 1996, the United States Supreme Court struck down an amendment to the Colorado state constitution. The amendment had nullified any existing antidiscrimination ordinances in the state but had also barred the passage of any gay and lesbian civil rights laws in Colorado.

The Supreme Court's decision to overturn Amendment 2 of the Colorado Constitution marked a turning point in the history of homosexuality in the United States. The decision represents a subtle shift in public discourse. Fewer people now believe that homosexuality is an evil and that society is justified in adopting severe forms of repression and disallowance (such as the Court upheld in Bowers v. Hardwick just ten years before). These days, people tend to define homosexuality as a quotidian trait or as a characteristic of human behavior that lawmakers, judges, and citizens should treat in a socially responsible manner.

This transition takes the status of lesbians and gay men from sexual outlaws to citizens.^[1]

American society, which had for so long exhibited the complex historical intertwinement of homoeroticism and homophobia that signifies American homo , now has an explicit public discourse dedicated to the status of homosexuality in American life. The public discourse links the conversations of ordinary men and women, gay or straight, to the institutional discourses of churches, legislatures, and the Supreme Court. People commonly debate homosexual issues, including the rights of gay men and lesbians to serve in the military, the right to privacy (Bowers v. Hardwick ), the legitimacy of civil rights legislation (the Colorado decision), and the right to same-sex marriages. The public discourse is highly contested, characterized by sexual latitudinarism as well as homophobic populism, but homosexuality is no longer a taboo subject in society.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the Colorado decision, arguing that the provision under consideration, which singled out Colorado's homosexuals, violates the U.S. Constitution's equal protection guarantee that "[a] state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws." Such a designation would have established a legal disability so sweeping that the majority of the Court concluded that Amendment 2 was otherwise inexplicable except for simple hatred—"animus" in the Court's language. The language of Amendment 2 almost resembled that of the laws that the Nazis passed to disenfranchise German Jews. The opening of Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion reinforced this comparison: "The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite. The constitutional amendment before us here is not the manifestation of a 'bare … desire to harm homosexuals,' … but rather a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through the use of laws."^[2] Both opinions acknowledge, in different ways, the ongoing culture wars that have placed homosexuality at the center of American political life.^[3]

One of the historical ironies is that the AIDS epidemic has helped open homosexuals to participate in the process of government—primarily by forming policies about medical and epidemiological research

on HIV, HIV prevention plans, and the treatment and care of people with AIDS.

After representatives of gay men and women began to help formulate policies and, perhaps even more significantly, after the details of gay men's sexual practices became the subject of epidemiological and prevention discourses, it became increasingly difficult for political leaders to avoid confronting other issues raised by the gay and lesbian communities. The infamous Helms amendment attempts to shun such subjects. The amendment insists on excluding from all federally funded HIV prevention literature any nonjudgmental information about homosexuality; obviously, such a law would prohibit an honest description of gay men's sexual practices.^[4]

Storming such "sacred institutions" as the military and marriage by demanding the same rights as heterosexuals seems almost like an unexceptional stage in consolidating lesbian and gay citizenship. At the same time, the gay movement (as well as the AIDS movement) has become increasingly dependent on the state.

The Supreme Court's Colorado decision is only the latest episode in the culture wars over homosexuality, which have been waged continuously since 1977. Before then, they erupted only intermittently, such as during the McCarthy scare in the 1950s. Homosexuality represents a historically complex entanglement of religion, politics, and culture. Gay and lesbian identity politics is, only in part, about the social status of self-identified homosexuals; it is also about the meaning of sexuality, gender, the family, and even community in our society.

The transformation from sexual outlaw to citizen challenges groups both outside the lesbian and gay communities and inside them. Religious fundamentalists, of course, abhor the social acceptance of a group they see as sinful and morally decadent, a community that seems to transgress some of their most treasured values.^[5] The lesbian and gay communities, however, have considerable ambivalence toward the campaign for citizenship, because the outlaw status of homosexuals is historically very significant. It originally spurred the creation of the gay and lesbian movement, stimulated cultural creativity, and helped to mobilize the building of lesbian and gay communities across the nation.

Queer politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s celebrated the

otherness, the differentness, and the marginality of the homosexual, whereas the gay politics of citizenship acknowledges the satisfactions of conforming, passing, belonging, and being accepted. We have suffered from the stigma, the exclusion from society, and the homophobia that made lesbians and gay men pariahs. At the same time, we have rights as citizens, rights that we earned by fulfilling the same duties as "straight" citizens—we pay taxes, we fight in wars, we vote in elections.

The increased participation of lesbians and gay men in the political and governing process bears one fundamental and risky irony.^[6] Disciplinary mechanisms and normative processes shape the political identities of citizens (e.g., as punctual, economically self-sufficient, knowledgeable, law-abiding individuals), as well as enabling their political participation. But the democratic participation of those same citizens also masks disciplinary and normative procedures. At the same time that citizens exercise their political freedom, they have also been trained, counseled, and disciplined in order to qualify as citizens. The normative expectation is that the gay man as sexual outlaw must give up his public sex in the park in order to become the sexual citizen who qualifies for the right to serve openly in the military.

Similarly, the corporate effort to expand the lesbian and gay market has a "regulatory" or "disciplinary" effect. It represents an improvement in some respects by offering new goods and services—but it also shapes the psychological and physical needs that those goods satisfy. It fixes or reifies those needs and limits satisfaction to that provided by those commodities available in the gay marketplace. Needs that are not met are marginalized, sometimes even stigmatized. In addition, social acceptance and the recognition of political rights ensure the accessibility of the good gay citizen to various normalizing and regulatory practices. As Foucault bitterly observed, every institutionalized form of political rights (a positive achievement) also enables disciplinary and normalizing forms of domination (not necessarily good things). Yet, only the active exercise of democratic rights allows a group to resist, modify, or restructure the forms of domination operating through discipline and normalization.^[7]

Lesbian and gay activists have characterized this complicated and double-edged process as "mainstreaming." Like a struggle in quicksand, the effort to define political rights may only make the lesbian and gay communities sink further into a morass of normalizing discipline. Homosexuals cannot, however, just walk away from this messy and contradictory aspect of civil life.

No one can ever completely step outside of the society in which they were reared. Not even by emigrating to another country can we escape our socialization and language, nor can we consent to our society's stigmatization of homosexuality. Deciding neither to step outside the arena nor to accept its prevalent mores is a surefire formula for conflict but it is unavoidable—so many different things divide the terrain of social life.^[8] There are no transcendent solutions to the ambivalence of identity—our only consolations are the "concrete social structures of friendship, love and pity."^[9] The powers of sexual perversity and community nurture these structures.^[10]

Politically, the only viable strategy will be to create a sense of community, form alliances with other social groups and movements, and then take direct political action. In our society, this is the only way to build political and cultural hegemony. This triangular strategy of community building, direct action, and political alliance resembles the strategy that Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci formulated. He argued that in Europe's and North America's highly developed civil and market societies, an oppositional political movement must wage both a war of position (for example, by building communities) and a war of maneuver (direct action plus political alliances). In this way, the movement can resist hegemonic institutions and ideologies, such as the heterosexual, male-centered, and reproductivist cultural norms and institutions that stigmatize homosexuality.^[11]

When building communities, gay and lesbian activists must include the full range of economic, cultural, and political institutions. In contrast, when they take direct action, activists can target particular issues and specific enemies. Finally, lesbians and gay men must forge political alliances that allow the gay movement to engage in negotiations, and make viable compromises, with other communities and movements.