1
Sexual Revolution And The Politics Of Gay Identity

This dispersion and reconstitution of the self.
That's the whole story.
BAUDELAIRE

The lesbian and gay movements have achieved a recognized presence in American life.^[1] There are open communities of lesbians and gay men in many cities. Community organizations and businesses cater specifically to the needs of the homosexual population. Until recently, there was a lesbian and gay caucus in the Democratic Party, and there are lesbian and gay political clubs in most cities. Openly gay men and lesbians have been elected to city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress. These remarkable developments have occurred because the lesbian and gay movements have stressed a politics of identity closely modeled on the politics of ethnic and racial minorities.

The homosexual politics of identity successfully married interest-group politics to a radical reinterpretation of the social definitions of gender and sexuality. The original sense of identity was based on people's shared sexual preferences and on similar encounters with homophobia. The fundamental ambivalence of homosexuals, which originates in being raised as heterosexuals, makes the discursive process of identity formation central to gay and lesbian politics. The "ethnic model" of homosexual identity emerged when lesbians and gay men had accumulated enough political and economic resources to contend with other interest groups.

In the 1980s, lesbian and gay male communities entered a new period in relation to the homosexual identity developed in the 1970s. Both lesbians and gay men have created a network of institutions that reaches outside their shared sexual preferences; in addition, they have adopted norms of conduct that guide their members, and they have a small degree of power in American society. Within this context, other forms of sexual expression (e.g., bisexuality, S/M, butch/femme role-playing, and transgendered identities) have provoked intense and highly politicized debates. Since the early 1980s, the AIDS crisis in the gay male community has provoked a full-scale reassessment of sexual behavior and its relationship to gay identity.

These developments have brought into question the belief in a fixed homosexual identity with permanent sexual and political significance.^[2] Questioning this belief poses problems of great theoretical and political urgency. Should the lesbian and gay movements abandon the politics of identity? Why are sexual identities political? What historical conditions underlie the emergence of the gay and lesbian movements? Before we can address the political and strategic question of whether or not homosexuals should abandon a politics of identity, we must address the theoretical and historical issues of why and how sexual identities are politicized.

Transformations Of The Sex/Gender System

Since World War II, various groups dissatisfied with the social relations of sex and gender have become political subjects and have mobilized

to redefine the social relations and norms that regulate gender and sexuality. It is not possible to understand this history without referring to the ensemble of discourses, practices, and institutions that structure and regulate the social relations of gender and the varieties of sexual behavior. This ensemble of discourses, practices, and institutions—which Gayle Rubin calls the sex/gender system—maps biological capacities onto the symbolic and social patterns that constitute our lives as gendered and sexual human beings.^[3]

The sex/gender system operates through different types of social structures. Among the most important are forms of domination , which privilege certain groups of people and restrict the rights of others. For example, men exercise power over women and children in the patriarchal nuclear family, stigmatized sexual activities are allowed to take place in urban back regions, and women and minorities earn less than white men in a segmented labor market. Another set of structures is normative regulations : these include the sexual double standard, which establishes different standards of sexual behavior for men (casual or extrarelationship sex is okay) and women (who are denigrated if they engage in casual or frequent sexual activities); the heterosexual presumption, which enforces the assumption that everyone is heterosexual, thus putting the socially awkward burden on homosexuals to identify themselves; and the male breadwinner ethic, which promotes the male as the sole provider of a family's economic support. A third group of structures is symbolic codes , which are ideological formulations such as the idea of romantic love, the Christian conception of marriage, biological reproduction as an evolutionary responsibility, and the belief in children's sexual innocence.^[4]

Sexual identities result from historical struggles between groups (for example, prostitutes' conflict with the state) and from social relations in the sex/gender system. As forms of subjectivity and agency, sexual identities are continually in the process of forming. They are not uniquely determined by the economic, political, normative, or symbolic aspects of the sex/gender system—the outcomes and meanings of this process are reconstituted at each moment of history. Historically, the politicized struggles of sexual identities have modified the conditions under which the identities initially formed. The sex/gender system is

not an isolated system of institutions and practices. Rather, it interacts with the economy, the state, and other social ensembles, such as those devoted to racial formation, class structure, or generational differences.^[5]

Beginning in 1940, the massive mobilization of civilians and armed services during World War II transformed the American sex/gender system. This transformation is immense and contradictory (very much as the Industrial Revolution was). The process of changing the sex/gender system should not be understood as necessarily coherent or "progressive," but as involving antagonistic movements and ideologies that contend for their own visions of possible sexual and gender arrangements. This dynamic process of historical change—with its moments of rupture and periods of stability—is what I mean by "sexual revolution."

The postwar sexual revolution underwent, I believe, three politically and analytically distinct "moments" (which are not strictly chronological). The first occurred when Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues discovered a gap between sexual norms and sexual behavior. On the basis of this discovery, Kinsey critiqued sexual norms.

The second moment emerged during the highly contradictory period of postwar prosperity, which Keynesian economic policies created. This period involved marked reactionary tendencies toward gender roles (the attempt to keep women in the home) and extreme pronatalism (the baby boom). The consumption ethos of the times, however, tended to undermine the repressive measures toward women and sexual minorities. In this period, a number of intellectuals critiqued sexual repression and its power to enforce norms of gender and sexuality. The works of these intellectuals helped to develop the sexual revolution's political identities.

In the third moment, the gay liberation movement emerged in the wake of the women's movement. As the male-dominated family declined and as women reacted to the sexism they discovered in the student movement and the New Left, they mobilized politically. Inspired by the women's movement, and building on a gay urban subculture that existed since World War II, gay people forged a collective sexual culture and thus, to some extent, reinterpreted the symbolism of sexuality and gender.

Before we can examine these developments in the post-World War II period, we must abandon the assumption that the social regulation of sexuality operates only through repression.^[6] Transforming the sex/gender system means not only eliminating repressive strictures on sexual behavior but also continually and affirmatively establishing new forms of gender and sexuality. These transformations affect economic and political relations, attitudes, and laws, and in turn influence the symbolic and cultural meanings of gender and sexuality.

Historical and anthropological research has shown that homosexual persons (i.e., people who occupy a social position or role as homosexuals) do not exist in many societies, whereas homosexual behavior occurs in virtually every society.^[7] Therefore, we must distinguish between homosexual behavior and homosexual identity . One term refers to one's sexual activity per se (whether casual or regular); the other word defines homosexuality as a social role, with its emotional and sexual components. Such a distinction is consciously rooted in historical and cross-cultural comparisons between homosexuality in advanced industrial societies and homosexuality in other cultures or eras. For instance, in ancient Greece, homosexual relationships between older men and younger men were commonly accepted as pedagogic. Within the context of an erotic relation, the older man taught the younger one military, intellectual, and political skills. The older men, however, were also often husbands and fathers. Neither sexual relationship excluded the other. Thus, although ancient Greek society recognized male homosexual activity as a valid form of sexuality, the men involved in these relationships rarely defined themselves as primarily "homosexual."^[8]

Another institutionalized form of homosexuality existed in many American Indian societies. Girls and boys in these societies could refuse initiation into their adult gender roles and instead adopt the social role of the other gender. For example, men who dressed and acted in accordance with the adult female role were known as "two-spirit" or berdache (originally the French term for these Indians). The berdache often married Indian men. The partners in these marriages did not define themselves as "homosexuals," nor did their societies recognize them as such, but their marital sex life consisted of homosexual sexual relations.^[9]

This theoretical distinction between behavior and identity is crucial to the histories of homosexuality, and, frequently, to the histories of the gay and lesbian emancipation movements.^[10]

Kinsey And The Liberal Imagination

The mobilization for World War II profoundly rocked the social relations of gender and sexuality in the United States. Young men and women left the haven of their families and lived for four years among other people, far from parental guidance.

Recognition of a sexual revolution dawned slowly after the war. Alfred Kinsey's two pathbreaking volumes on human sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , which was published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , which was published in 1953, probably influenced modern conceptions of sexuality more than any work since Freud's. Kinsey's work mapped in detail a submerged continent known only from the exposed mountaintops of archipelagoes. The report sparked moral outrage and a great deal of hypocrisy, but made most Americans acutely aware of the gap between daily sexual activities and public attitudes toward that sexual behavior.

In his review of the first volume, the cultural critic Lionel Trilling saw the Kinsey report as a symptomatic failure of the liberal imagination: "The Report has the intention of habituating its readers to sexuality in all its manifestations: it wants to establish as it were, a democratic pluralism of sexuality. … That this generosity of mind is much to be admired goes without saying. … [But] it goes with a nearly conscious aversion from making intellectual distinctions, almost as if out of the belief that an intellectual distinction must inevitably lead to a social discrimination or exclusion."^[11]

Although many of Kinsey's analyses and assumptions can be criticized, both volumes offer sophisticated and often subtle discussions of many aspects of sexual life. Nevertheless, many intellectuals and readers objected to Kinsey's project for its empirical, materialistic, and ostensibly value-free investigation into human sexuality. Although Kinsey

never espoused tolerance explicitly as a moral position, that ethic was fundamental to his work; in both volumes, he stressed acceptance of people as they are and repeatedly noted people's limited ability to modify their sexual behavior.^[12]

Struck by the extraordinary extent of individual variation in sexual behavior, Kinsey argued that any attempt to establish uniform standards of sexual behavior was both impracticable and unjust. He supplemented this theme of individual variation by stressing what Paul Robinson has called our "common deviance."^[13] Kinsey believed that this widespread deviation from accepted sexual standards showed that attempts to regulate sexual behavior were doomed to failure and that "the only proper sexual policy was no policy at all."^[14]

As texts, Kinsey's studies united a positivistic-empirical investigation of sexual behavior and an amoral attitude of tolerance. Kinsey achieved this synthesis through his radical materialism, which led him to measure sexual experience by tabulating the number of orgasms experienced during a sexual encounter. Kinsey demoted heterosexual intercourse to only one of six possible "sexual outlets" or orgasms, which included masturbation, nocturnal emission, heterosexual petting, homosexual relations, and intercourse with animals. Kinsey's tolerance was less a moral idea than a statistical concept reflecting inclusiveness. From this perspective, the sole distinction between heterosexuals and homosexuals is that the former are attracted to people of the other gender, whereas the latter are attracted to those of the same gender. Wherever Kinsey discusses the religious and moral attitudes that regulate sexual behavior, he valorizes the behavior and characterizes the norms as naive, mystifying, and ideological.

One of the major shortcomings of Kinsey's volumes is the absence of any historical perspective. Although Kinsey actually collected statistical material for a decade (from 1938 to 1947), his analysis collapses any possible diachronic dimension. The historical aspect survives only in his analysis of sexual behavior by age, but even then, Kinsey views age as a stage of the life cycle, rather than acknowledging generational differences. Kinsey's blindness toward history obscures the political climate within which his studies were published. Although the Kinsey

reports emerged at the beginning of a second "sexual revolution" (an earlier one occurred in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, between 1890 and 1919), Kinsey's data reflected the sexual behavior of the generations that came to adulthood between 1920 and 1940, a period that evidenced little sexual change.

Kinsey's data did show traces of an earlier sexual revolution, but he did not publish these data in either of the two reports.^[15] An earlier survey of sexual behavior had already revealed that twice as many women born between 1890 and 1899 (and therefore reaching maturity between 1910 and 1920) had premarital intercourse as did women born before 1890.^[16] Although the Kinsey reports did not capture the post-World War II sexual revolution (partly because they studied the interwar generations and partly because they assumed that sexuality as a physiological activity did not have a history), they did come to symbolize that revolution in the popular consciousness and in the history of ideas. For American liberals, the Kinsey reports unified heterogeneous intellectual and political elements. They offered an interpretation of sexual acts that was empirically grounded, embedded in a critique of accepted sexual norms, and politically united by an ethic of tolerance. The Kinsey reports served as the basis of the liberal theory of sexual liberation, in which all types of sexual activity were equally valid.

Kinsey's findings on homosexuality were among the most controversial and widely publicized. His volume on male sexuality concluded that 37 percent of the U.S. male population had had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm between adolescence and old age. The data also seemed to suggest that many adults were neither permanently nor exclusively homosexual or heterosexual but evidenced a fluid continuum of sexual behavior. Kinsey measured this fluidity along the Kinsey scale of heterosexual to homosexual behavior and fantasy, ranging from o (exclusively heterosexual) through 6 (exclusively homosexual). Although Kinsey's findings clearly encouraged him to reject homosexuality as a pathological syndrome, the range and fluidity of many Americans' sexual behavior also led him to reject the idea of a sexual identity; he believed that there were no homosexual persons, only homosexual acts.^[17]

Kinsey's emphasis on acts and the number of orgasms ignored the political and historical meaning of his analysis. If his synchronic analysis of sexual outlets obscured the emergence of sexual revolution, his ontology of acts failed to recognize potential political actors—such as youth, women, and homosexuals—who would make the postwar sexual revolution. Although Kinsey's paradigm had an enormous emancipatory impact on American society (its other major contribution was to recognize female sexuality), its positivistic methodology and its conception of tolerance overlooked the significance of gay cultural developments in the early 1950s.

Homosexuals themselves were divided over what their emerging sense of "group consciousness" meant. The Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1951, marked the beginning of a continuous history of homosexual emancipation movements in the United States.^[18] Many of the Mattachine Society's founders had extensive political experience in the Communist Party or on the Left before they began organizing homosexuals. The parallel experiences of Communist Party members and homosexuals in the late 1940s and early 1950s led the early Mattachine leaders to model their new organization on the Communist Party, emphasizing secrecy, centralized leadership, and a hierarchy of "cells."^[19]

Marxist analysis also helped the early Mattachine leaders develop a political analysis of homosexual oppression that emphasized its "socially determined pattern." From their early group discussions, these Mattachine members concluded that homosexuals were an oppressed cultural minority. They believed that rigid definitions of gender behavior led men and women to accept unquestioningly social roles that equated "male, masculine, man only with husband and Father" and that equated "female, feminine, women only with wife and Mother." These early homosexual emancipationists saw homosexual women and men as victims of a "language and culture that did not admit the existence of a Homosexual Minority." For those activists, homosexuals constituted a social minority imprisoned within a dominant culture. Largely, they were a minority unaware of themselves as a distinct group.^[20]

Although this analysis seemed consistent with the experience of many gay women and men at the time, as well as with subsequent history, other homosexuals in the Mattachine Society argued that the cultural and social characteristics of gay life resulted from ostracism and oppression itself. Against the "cultural minority" thesis, these critics often adopted Kinsey's argument that homosexuals and heterosexuals differed only in their sexual preferences.

Each line of argument conceptualized the homosexual self differently, and each implied alternative political strategies. The cultural minority thesis argued that homosexuals had developed differently because they had been excluded from dominant heterosexual culture. The "secondary socialization" of homosexuals into a distinct subculture helped them to develop appropriate new values, relationships, and cultural forms because homosexual life "did not fit the patterns of heterosexual love, marriage, children, etc. upon which the dominant culture rests."^[21] The proponents of the cultural minority thesis recognized that homosexuals also internalized the dominant culture's view of themselves as aberrant and were often forced by social stigma to lead lives of secrecy, hypocrisy, and emotional stress. These proponents therefore emphasized the need for a critique of this internalized self-oppression and the development of "an ethical homosexual culture."

The alternative "assimilationist" position sought to achieve societal acceptance of homosexuals by emphasizing the similarities between homosexuals and heterosexuals. Proponents felt that the "secondary socialization" of homosexuals resulted from a life given over to hiding, isolation, and internalized self-hatred. For this reason, homosexuals should adopt a "pattern of behavior that is acceptable to society in general and compatible with [the] recognized institutions … of home, church and state," rather than creating an "ethical homosexual culture," which would only accentuate the perceived differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals and provoke continued hostility. The "cultural minority" analysis was hotly debated in the early years of the Mattachine Society, but after many battles, marked also by anticommunism, the assimilationist thesis prevailed and served as the ideological basis for the homosexual rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s.

Thus, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Kinsey's paradigm permeated the political discourses of sexual emancipation. We find its marks on homosexual politics,^[22] on popular conceptions of female sexuality, on the sociological analysis of the premarital sexual activities of young men and women,^[23] and on the "philosophy" of Playboy magazine.^[24] The Kinsey paradigm validated sexual activity (lots of orgasms) and criticized the normative regulation of sexual behavior. But this approach offered no theory of sexual coding (i.e., the symbolic and cultural significance of sexual acts). Not only did it therefore ignore the mundane importance of "romantic love," but it also played down the social construction of sexuality and the role of subcultures and secondary socialization in an individual's sexual development. In a corresponding fashion, the assimilationist position of the Mattachine Society overlooked the possible significance of sexual culture. This made it not only difficult to conceive of homosexuals as political subjects but also impossible to imagine the gay subculture as a community that had resources to mobilize and that could organize politically.

The Kinsey reports' lack of historical perspective on sexuality also made it difficult to interpret the radical transformation of the sex/gender system that, in the wake of World War II, began to modify the everyday significance of family life, gender roles, and sexual behavior. Both the cultural minority thesis and the assimilation argument also suffered from their lack of historical perspective. Although the cultural minority thesis could easily have accommodated an account of the historical development of a homosexual minority, it did not find the ideological space to do so. The assimilationist perspective implied a history of sexual oppression (because no difference "really" existed between homosexuals and heterosexuals, history alone could explain the peculiar reasons and means heterosexuals had for repressing homosexuality), but such a history was not articulated. Both kinds of history would have been useful, but neither developed during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Both the liberal imagination and the homophile movement (as the homosexual emancipation movement of that time called itself in order to downplay the "sexual") conceptualized sexual emancipation as a critique of ideological and unrealistic sexual norms in favor of people's

actual sexual behavior. Neither perspective emphasized the family as a form of dominance or criticized sexual repression for its impact on the culture and institutions of American society. A critique of sexual repression in American society eventually emerged from a leftist analysis of the economic role of sexual repression.

The Sexual Contradictions Of Keynesianism

Throughout World War II, most economists, politicians, and the general public had no doubt that the most important postwar economic and political problem would be that of providing full employment. Many people feared a return to the grim economic realities of the 1930s. Policymakers subordinated other postwar economic and social policies to the goal of full employment.^[25] The labor movement also pushed hard for full-employment legislation.

A series of important pieces of labor legislation (the Wagner Act of 1935, the Social Security Act of 1935, and the postwar Taft-Hartley and McCarran Acts) helped to alter the relations between labor demand and labor supply. These acts culminated in the Employment Act, the centerpiece of postwar capital-labor relations, which established full employment as a priority of the federal government's economic policy.^[26] In the two decades leading up to the Employment Act, restrictive immigration legislation in the 1920s and the declining U.S. birthrate during the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the tight labor markets of the 1940s and 1950s that helped spur on the postwar baby boom.^[27]

The watered-down version of the Employment Act that eventually passed in 1946 only established the principle of the federal government's maintaining "maximum employment, production and purchasing power." Even so, additional legislation bolstered the act's rather vague guidelines, creating unemployment compensation, minimumwage legislation, and old-age and survivor insurance. If the 1946 Employment Act provided the Keynesian rationale for full employment as a governmental policy in the postwar period, the military budget supplied

the bulk of federal spending that sustained high levels of aggregate demand throughout the 1950s and 1960s.^[28]

Through these long-term modifications in the labor relations and macroeconomic policy, the Keynesian welfare state had a considerable impact on the dynamics of autonomy and dependence between family members. Other aspects of the immediate postwar economic situation also destabilized relations within the family. Reestablishing a peacetime economy led to a temporary drop in women's participation in the labor force. By January 1946, four million fewer women worked than at the 1944 wartime employment peak; most lost their jobs. At the same time, total civilian employment increased from 52.8 million to 57.8 million as soldiers left the armed services.^[29]

From 1945 to 1955, there was a concerted effort to reestablish "traditional values." Not only had the war disrupted men's dominance in the family but the depression had also severely undermined the "male breadwinner role."^[30] Social upheavals, the unprecedented migration and breakup of families, and women's entry into the labor force during the war years were counteracted in the postwar period by a barrage of publicity. For instance, many sociologists during the late 1940s and early 1950s argued that if women continued to work, children would be neglected and the home would be endangered. They argued for restoring the paternalistic family.^[31] Postwar ideological campaigns that portrayed women's place as being in the home, postwar federal economic policies, and private industry's personnel policies were all intended to revitalize the male-led nuclear family and reestablish the pre-depression relations of autonomy and dependence in the family.

During the depression, the high level of male unemployment and the economic difficulties that most households experienced had begun to alter the relations of autonomy and dependence within the family. Many married women and children entered the labor market in order to compensate for the decline of the male breadwinner's earnings.^[32] Children frequently took on adult responsibilities at an early age. Girls were drawn into the domestic management of the household, whereas boys were forced to take on breadwinning responsibilities. Following on this, the war experience offered unprecedented personal autonomy

and economic independence to the generation reared in the 1930s. Because of this, many men and women found it difficult to return to more traditional gender roles when the war ended. Many married women reentered the labor force soon after the demobilization was complete. By 1952, some 10.4 million wives held jobs—2 million more than at the height of World War II. Substantial numbers of these women were the middle-aged wives who had first found it respectable to be employed outside the home during the war.

The baby boom represented a significant development in heterosexual behavior during the postwar period. Marital fertility rates had been declining since 1800, and the baby boom reversed that trend. The change occurred because, compared with their predecessors, a high proportion of women born in the 1920s and 1930s married at a young age and began families soon afterward.^[33] The extended postwar prosperity may have encouraged marriage and childbearing; it implicitly promised a better economic future than the one most people experienced during the 1930s.^[34] The postwar period also saw unprecedented attention paid to sexual pleasure in marriage; the National Fertility Studies of 1965 and 1970 revealed a great number of unwanted pregnancies in the 1950s.^[35] Postwar ideological and attitudinal shifts toward home, family, and children also resulted from suburbanization. This process established new communities on the fringes of large cities. Husbands began making long commutes. Community life became centered around the activities of children and mothers.

These demographic trends merged with certain political developments that surfaced immediately after the war. For example, the pronatalism and the attempted restoration of the patriarchal family also coincided with the postwar moral panic about "the homosexual menace" and "the sexual offender." Throughout the postwar period, many states and cities launched campaigns to control sexual psychopaths and "deviants." The McCarthy witch-hunts focused on homosexuals in the government as "security risks" and as morally and politically suspect.^[36]

The Keynesian prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s created a double bind for the postwar family. The exploding cost of rearing children and family members' rising consumer expectations eventually rendered the

family wage (based on the man's earnings) insufficient. The family needed a supplemental income to attain the new postwar standard of living. Although a woman's earnings were usually below even her own subsistence level, they were nevertheless high enough to affect the family's standard of living.^[37] This Keynesian double bind is the foundation of what Daniel Bell has called "the cultural contradictions of capitalism"—the tension between work, accumulation, and production as ends in themselves and work as a means to consumption and hedonistic gratification.^[38]

As married women increasingly entered the labor force, gender roles within the family began to change.^[39] Thus, women's labor-force participation continued to undermine the male-dominated family in the postwar sex/gender system. In the late 1950s, normative family regulations—"the breadwinner ethic" and "a woman's place is in the home"—had less and less relevance to most people's behavior. Young men and women began living outside family households, fueling a host of cultural revolts and urban subcultures. Wage and job discrimination against women and single men, reinforced by the gender-segregated labor market, perpetuated some of the economic imbalances in power and resources between men and women in families.

From 1950 through 1964, men frequently opposed the norms of gender and sex. Even with the economic support provided by government spending and other Keynesian full-employment policies, many men resisted the burden of being the primary breadwinner, as Barbara Ehrenreich has shown in The Hearts of Men . Failure to sustain the breadwinner role implied immaturity and was considered symptomatic of latent homosexuality or a mother fixation.^[40] Minor revolts ranged from the "Gray Flannel dissidents" (rebels in business suits) and the Beat generation to the readers of Playboy magazine. The male rebellions of the 1950s took place within the context of the attempted revival of maledominated sex/gender arrangements.

Men often directed resentment at the women and children for whom men had to commit themselves to boring and unsatisfactory jobs, whereas women who were still full-time housewives often displaced resentment onto their fellow prisoners in the home—their children.^[41]

Family responsibilities began to bear more heavily on many male workers when wives went to work in order to maintain the family standard of living.

Many blue-collar workers were dissatisfied with the meaninglessness of their work and with feeling powerlessness to affect the course of production. Increasingly, the problems of labor and workers' discontentment received public attention.^[42] As the 1950s wore on, postwar affluence did not allay these frustrations and anxieties.

By 1960, three books had appeared that would become extremely influential in the coming decade: Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955), Norman O. Brown's Life against Death (1959), and Paul Goodman's Growing up Absurd (1960). Although substantial differences exist among these authors, all three critiqued what Marcuse called "the performance principle" in the name of erotic and sensual gratification. All three examined the consequences of the social repression of "instinctual" erotic needs. Although each work explored different aspects, they all questioned the organization of work (particularly Goodman and Marcuse) and the role of family in the repression of sexual desire. In recognition of American society's display of economic abundance, Marcuse claimed that there was "surplus repression," that is, more repression than necessary for society to function. Marcuse and Goodman also identified possible sources of political and historical change; in other words, they identified political subjects as agents of social change.

In terms of sexuality, Marcuse saw "perversions" as the champions of the pleasure principle; they upheld sexuality as an end in itself. He claimed that "they thus place themselves outside the domination of the performance principle and challenge its very foundation."^[43] He cited "narcissism" and "homosexuality" as revolutionary sexualities because they were not procreative. Both Marcuse and Brown championed "polymorphous perversity," a sexuality not narrowly focused on any specific object or activity.

Paul Goodman's argument rested on a more orthodox Reichian foundation—it focused on "repression" rather than Brown's and Marcuse's polymorphous perversity. In an essay published right after the war, Goodman had argued that "the repression of infantile and adolescent sexuality is the direct cause of submissiveness of the people to present

political rule of whatever kind."^[44] Thus, in Growing up Absurd he identified youth as the political subject who must rebel against meaningless work and sensual repression.

In some form or another, all three writers managed to depict the tangled web of sexuality and economics that characterized the 1950s. All assumed that economic abundance was a necessary condition for eliminating any "surplus repression." All criticized the repressive expectations of work life and family life, the linking of procreation and work, and the denial of pleasure in work and sexuality.

In identifying the homosexual as a champion of pleasure and eros, Marcuse named one of the moral bogeymen of the 1950s as a figure of liberation. In contrast, both Brown and Marcuse resisted equating sex with Kinsey's notion of outlets—that is, orgasm. They both criticized "the tyranny of the orgasm" as a form of repressed sexuality. Instead, they argued for the primeval innocence of polymorphous perversity. In addition, Goodman argued that youth was the group most likely to break the stranglehold of repression. Indeed, it was this postwar generation that really began the sexual revolution in all its aspects.

The radical critique of sexual repression may have encouraged politically conscious youth to challenge the norms of sexual and gender behavior effectively. The affluence and consumption ethic of "permissive" Keynesianism probably had a larger impact on the sexual revolution, though, by undermining the disciplinary effect of the bread winner ethic and hence the paternalistic family's cohesiveness. The radical critique did offer an effective basis for sexual politics—more so than the Kinsey critique, which restricted itself merely to a critique of sexual norms. Neither a critique of norms nor a critique of repression could help change the symbolic significance of sex, however. Changing that required a third "moment"—the creation of a collective sexual culture.

The Sex/Gender Code

Although the Kinsey reports helped homosexuals recognize that a large number of Americans had had homosexual experience, simply recognizing the gap between sexual norms and behavior did not provide an

adequate ideological basis for mobilizing the homosexual population. The quantitative empiricism of the Kinsey perspective precluded a clear conception of the homosexual identity. The behavioral continuum of the Kinsey scale created uncertainty about the existence of a sense of group identity in response to social stigma. The contemporary sense of "homosexual identity" did not first appear in the post-World War II period; it had become increasingly defined at least since the end of the nineteenth century.

In the United States, physicians first posed homosexuality as a theoretical problem in medical discourse.^[45] Nineteenth-century physicians were puzzled by a broad range of deviant gender behavior. For instance, they observed women dressing in male clothes, living and passing as men, and having sexual relations with women; women who could whistle admirably; men who never smoked, never married, and were entirely averse to outdoor pursuits; and women who drank, smoked, and were very independent in their ways.^[46] Physicians applied the term "sexual inversion" to a whole spectrum of gender-role variations, only one of which involved sexual desire for someone of the same gender. Inverts were men and women who did not conform to accepted norms of gender behavior. But the theory of sexual inversion could not explain the traditional "feminine" partners of female inverts or the "masculine" partners of male inverts. Thus, physicians increasingly began to distinguish homosexual desire (or sexual perversion in nineteenth-century terms) from gender-role nonconformity (or inversion).

Once homosexual desire became analytically distinct from gender behavior, physicians attempted to explain homosexuality by arguing that homosexuals were in fact hermaphrodites—incorporating the biological traits of both genders. Although medical research in this period often claimed to find evidence of hermaphroditism (such as a lesbian with a large clitoris or a male homosexual with feminine bodily characteristics), concepts of somatic hermaphroditism gave way to psychic hermaphroditism. According to this theory, a person might have the anatomical characteristics of his or her own gender but the soul of the other gender.

It was important to nineteenth-century homosexual intellectuals to clarify these issues. Karl Ulrichs, a German writer who first envisioned a homosexual emancipation movement in the 1860s, suggested that the male homosexual had a "woman's spirit in a man's body."^[47] In the early twentieth century, homosexual activists Magnus Hirschfield and Edward Carpenter proposed a version of this idea, characterizing homosexuals as an "intermediate sex" that incorporated psychological qualities of both males and females.^[48]

In all these theories, homosexuality is explained in relation to the biological or behavioral definition of gender. This remained the case until the late 1960s. The psychoanalytic tradition, and especially the work of Irving Bieber, continued to rely on the assumption that there is a necessary relationship between the development of masculinity and femininity and heterosexuality or homosexuality.^[49]

Whether physicians or homosexuals themselves have formulated these theories of homosexuality, a deeply held, widely disseminated cultural "code" underlies all such attempts. Historically, this code has shaped our interpretation of the sex/gender system. In a pathbreaking formulation, Barbara Ponse has called this master code "the principle of consistency."^[50]

The principle of consistency links genetic assignment (i.e., whether a person has XX or XY chromosomes) to anatomy (there are, in fact, syndromes in which this link does not occur) to a gender identity (which is usually based on the gender assignment at birth).^[51]Gender identity is the privately held awareness of oneself as male or female. The principle of consistency then projects the gender role as a function of gender identity. Gender role is learned behavior, and although it is usually related to one's genetic assignment and gender identity, they do not necessarily determine gender role. In other words, to be born female does not guarantee femininity. According to the theory, gender roles imply sexual object choice. The principle of consistency assumes that one's gender role determines which gender one will find sexually attractive. The theory sees these elements as inseparable and natural. The principle of consistency explains why if one element is reversed, or "inverted," the other elements must be consistently inverted as well. A woman who wears

men's clothes (or indeed chooses to pass as a man) must be a man either biologically or psychologically ("a man's spirit in a woman's body"), as well as a lesbian.

In recent years, the emergence of lesbian and gay identities has led to some modifications in the principle of consistency. Ponse herself includes sexual identity (whether a person is homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual) as an element. One can elaborate this further by adding sexual role , which allows for active/passive, top/bottom, butch/femme.^[52] These amendments, however, imply a weakening of the principle; rigidly categorizing sex/gender behavior as male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, no longer has the force of earlier interpretations.

If the principle of consistency ideologically binds the ensemble of practices, discourses, and institutions in the sex/gender system, then the homosexual can only emerge as a subject, particularly as a political subject, with a reinterpretation of sexuality and gender's meanings. Otherwise, as long as people use a discourse of consistency when considering homosexuality, most aspects of homosexual life will be interpreted as anomalous and unnatural.

Cultural Politics In The City Of Night

How powerful is the principle of consistency as an underlying code in American culture? The principle shapes everyday social interactions in the form of the heterosexual assumption —the way most people presume everyone is heterosexual. Although the assumption has been weakened in certain cities with large homosexual populations and in certain occupational or cultural milieus, it still governs most social interactions. In the years before the gay movement was reborn in 1969, the social stigma attached to homosexuality reinforced this heterosexual assumption. Together, the heterosexual assumption and the stigma of homosexuality forced most lesbians and gay men to keep their homosexual feelings or activities secret. The stigma and the heterosexual assumption established the political horizon for all homosexual acts—they became both physical and symbolic.

In the period after World War II, most homosexuals were in the

closet. Most of them sought to "pass" as heterosexual in public settings such as the workplace or even within their families. Nevertheless, a vigorous underground culture emerged in cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. As women and men sought sexual partners, they created this urban, homosexual subculture. Unlike with ethnic or racial subcultures, families did not pass on and share the homosexual subculture. Most people had been reared in heterosexual families with the expectation that they would be heterosexual in adult life. Homosexuals often adopted those heterosexual expectations and social values for many years. But outside of lucky accidents (which often help people crystallize their sexual desires), most homosexual women and men had to go outside their social circles to find partners who shared their sexual desires. How was this possible when there were no public or explicit avowals of homosexuality? When there were no publicly acknowledged social spaces where lesbians or gay men could meet each other? When the heterosexual assumption and the stigma of homosexuality enforced silence, invisibility, and hostility?

Lesbians and gay men devised special tactics in order to identify sexual partners without much explicit discussion. In a study of oppositional social practices in everyday life, Michel de Certeau has emphasized that "tactics" are ways of using imposed cultural systems to achieve one's own desires. They introduce alternative or heterogeneous meanings into the dominant cultural system. Like wit, tactics require one to seize opportunities or time.^[53] Communication with a desired partner of unknown sexual preference requires great "tact." One must use the language of innuendo, well-placed pauses, carefully worded jokes, or ambiguous expression. For example, in John Rechy's 1963 novel City of Night , the narrator is propositioned on his first night at a New York City YMCA by another resident:

"They dont call this Y the French Embassy for nothing," the merchant marine laughs. He has sized me up slyly: broke and green in the big city—and he said: "You wouldnt believe if youd been at Mary's last night—thats a place in the Village and everything goes." He watches me evenly for some reaction, determining, Im sure, how far he can go how quickly. "So I spot this cute kid there—" Hes still studying me

carefully, and when I dont say anything, he continues with more assurance: "So I spot him and I want him—yeah sure Im queer—whatya expect?" he challenges. He pauses longer this time, watching me still calculatingly. He goes on: "And the kid's looking for maybe a pad to flop in and breakfast—hes not queer himself. I don't like em queer: If I did Id go with a woman—why fuck around with substitutes? … So this kid goes with me—Im feeling Good, just off the ship flush—I lay 50 bucks on him."^[54]

Rechy's account captures the ambiguities: "a place in the Village and everything goes" and the well-placed pauses and innuendoes, such as "So I spot this cute kid. …" The merchant marine doesn't say anything about the kid's gender; somehow it's understood, but not yet explicit. After the pause, he makes it clear when he continues, "So I spot him and I want him. …" After another pause, he adds, "Yeah, sure Im queer—whatya expect?"

The tactical uses of language were central to the lesbian and gay experience of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Making sexual contacts, however, often required "tactical" elaborations on a large scale. Sacha Lewis quotes from an account of such maneuvering:

When I was in high school I didn't even know the word lesbian , much less how to be one. I just knew I wanted to be with women. I wanted to go steady, date and have a woman to share intimate sexual feelings with. So I looked very carefully at how the boys in school got girls to date, go steady, neck and the rest. What I saw was that boys had short hair. What I saw was that boys wore shirts and pants. And what I saw at the time was that the most desirable boys were into leather jackets and chains and these huge silver rings that were kind of like brass knuckles—a real 40s thing. "Okay," I said, "that must be how you get girls." So that's what I did. … I must have looked pretty funny, but it [was a] very serious thing with me at the time because it worked. There were other girls who were gay and I guess I was so obvious that they had an easy time following me.^[55]

This woman's solution to the problem of satisfying her homosexual desires was to reinterpret the principle of consistency. She wanted to attract women, so she modeled herself on males. Thus, she created a

code that communicated a desire to establish sexual relations with women. By adopting a male role behavior, she became "obvious" to other women with homosexual preferences. Butch/femme roles were common (though certainly not universal) in the lesbian culture of the 1950s.^[56]

Because butch and femme roles appeared to be imitations of heterosexual roles, they were later denigrated in the early days of lesbian feminism. Butch/femme roles, however, actually reinterpreted male/female roles. Because women adopted both roles, they were in fact different from traditional heterosexual roles. Butch/femme dynamics became what William Simon and John Gagnon have called a sexual script.^[57] Butch and femme lesbians elaborated a mutual interpretative scheme that orchestrated their desires and integrated their biological capacities for arousal, climax, and resolution into sexually significant events. Joan Nestle saw her butch/femme relationships as "complex erotic statements." Butch lesbians were "tabooed women who were willing to identify their passion for other women by wearing clothes that symbolized the taking of responsibility. Part of this responsibility was sexual expertise. In the 1950s, this courage to feel comfortable with arousing another woman became a political act."^[58]

Butch and femme lesbian roles involved neither a repudiation of gender roles nor an exaltation of them. For example, whereas the lesbian butch may have adopted masculine behavior for its initiatory or managerial qualities, her primary preoccupation in sex was to forgo the macho behavior of pleasing herself first, instead pleasing the femme. Both roles allowed women to play with and to extend the range of possible behavior within a firm sense of female gender identity.^[59]

There was similar playfulness among gay men on the gender inversion theme, which in gay slang was called "camping it up." When "camping," men adopted feminine mannerisms, emphasizing through humor the apparent incongruity of a man's having sex with another man. Camp rested on the assumption that gender behavior is a role , something that can be adopted, changed, or dropped. It was a style of humor that allowed homosexuals to react to their situation with wry laughter rather than despair.^[60]

Camp as an aesthetic philosophy received public recognition in Susan Sontag's famous essay "Notes on Camp," published in the Partisan Review in 1964. Sontag acknowledged its roots in the homosexual community: "The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it's not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and most articulate audience—of Camp."^[61] Sontag ignored that camp grew out of the gay culture's process of recoding the sexual significance of gender and the principle of consistency. Although the camp sensibility, like butch/femme, cannot be attributed to all gay men and lesbians, it offered a counterhegemonic challenge to the sex/gender system.^[62] Both butch/femme role-playing and the camp sensibility reinterpreted sexual preference and sexual behavior as they related to gender. With wit and role-playing, homosexuals thereby drove a wedge between gender and sexuality. Homosexuals' everyday sexual practices, their butch/femme role-playing, and their camp sensibility significantly modified the dominant culture's notions of gender and sex for lesbians and gay men. In the 1950s, camp was the ideology of the homosexual subculture, which treated gender roles as performances with a sense of bitter irony. Gay cultural expressions such as camp became a fundamental challenge to the prevalent notions that gender, sexual preference, and sexual identity were natural.

In a predominantly hostile world, homosexuals limited their vulnerability by keeping their social and sexual transactions as invisible as possible. Many homosexuals joined highly closeted social circles in hopes of meeting other homosexuals in a relatively safe social setting. The homosexual stigma kept gay social spaces in "back regions" hidden from public view. These spaces were therefore vulnerable to illegal intrusions, such as criminal activity (many cities had Mafia-controlled gay bars) and police brutality and corruption (gay sexual activity often "hides" in red-light districts).^[63] Nevertheless, homosexuals (more often male, because public space has been traditionally dominated by men) established physical and social spaces within urban areas—bars, hotel lobbies, YMCAs, bathhouses, street corners, men's rooms, and gyms.

They appropriated space from the dominant culture (gay bars often evolved from bohemian or artists' bars) by introducing anomalous and coded practices, which often remained invisible to heterosexuals passing through (e.g., certain men's rooms become sites of sexual activity).^[64]

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, urban police departments all over the United States attempted to close gay bars and other homosexual meeting places. Although these drives severely disrupted the lives of homosexuals, they provoked political responses over and over again.^[65] These developments in gay life since the end of World War II—the increasingly elaborate cultural expressions; the proliferation of gay spaces; and the numerous, if minor, political mobilizations—created a sense of social identity.

The Search For A Gay Identity

The debate between the assimilationist perspective and the cultural minority thesis resurfaced in the mid-1960s.^[66] Mary McIntosh, a lesbian sociologist long active in the British Left, made an important contribution to this debate both in the United States and in Britain in 1968. She wrote her pioneering article "The Homosexual Role" as a direct response to the narrowly civil libertarian approach of the homophile movement.^[67] Her article helped to revive the debate that had taken place during the 1950s in the Mattachine Society between the assimilation approach and the cultural minority thesis.^[68] McIntosh argued that the homosexual role did not simply involve "sexual behavior" but a whole pattern of feelings, expectations, and strategies that emerged in response to the stigmatizing of homosexuals as pathological outcasts. McIntosh amplified her analysis of the distinction between sexual behavior and role or identity (as later theorists have called it) by documenting the development of the homosexual role in England.

Only one year later, hustlers, drag queens, and gay-bar patrons fought against police when they raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Several days of demonstrations followed. Established leaders from the homosexual Mattachine Society of New York and the lesbian organization

Daughters of Bilitis responded cautiously. Mattachine leaders still held that defining the homosexual as a unique minority defeats the very cause for which the homosexual strives—to be an integral part of society . A new group—the Gay Liberation Front (GLF)—formed, modeling itself on New Left organizations. Many of its members had participated in the antiwar movement and the counterculture. Instead of allying themselves with the preexisting movement, GLF leaders broke with "old-line" homosexuals.

After the 1969 Stonewall riots, a homosexual emancipation movement emerged. This movement, called "gay liberation," resulted from a clash of two cultures and two generations—the homosexual subculture of the 1950s and 1960s and the New Left counterculture of 1960s youth. Ideologically, the camp sensibility of the 1950s and early 1960s had served as a strategy of containment; it had balanced its scorn for the principle of consistency with a bitter consciousness of oppression in a framework that offered no vision of historical change. The gay liberationists, who rarely had much appreciation for traditional gay life, proposed a radical cultural revolution. Instead of protecting the right to privacy, gay liberation radicals insisted on coming out—the public disclosure of one's homosexuality—which then became the centerpiece of gay political strategy. For the gay movement, coming out was what Gramsci called a "catharsis." This occurs, he said, when a "structure ceases to be an external force which causes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive and is transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethnopolitical form and a source of new initiatives."^[69] To come "out of the closet" (originally a phrase of gay slang) was to do the very thing most feared in the gay culture of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Dennis Altman made the most sophisticated theoretical elaboration of the new gay politics in his 1971 book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation .^[70] The process of "coming out" is at the center of his analysis. This frequently difficult and painful process is both personal and political. The process could involve years of coming to terms with the specific cultural or religious beliefs that stigmatize homosexual behavior. The gay liberation movement gave a political meaning to coming

out by extending the psychological-personal process into public life; the movement encouraged lesbians and gay men to acknowledge their homosexuality publicly. Coming out thus became praxis. Altman interpreted this extended process of coming out as a search for identity. This identity, in his view, already existed and did not need to be self-consciously or politically constructed.^[71] Altman linked his analysis of the gay search for identity to Herbert Marcuse's and Norman O. Brown's ideas about the political potential of homosexuality and polymorphous perversity; Altman proposed that sexual liberation involved "a resurrection of our original impulse to take enjoyment from the total body" and that with liberation, homosexuality and heterosexuality would cease to be viewed as separate sexualities.^[72]

Like Marcuse and Brown, Altman analyzed how society has repressed polymorphous perversity by removing the erotic from all areas of life and denying people's inherent bisexuality by polarizing gender roles. He went on to argue, "How far sexual freedom can be conceived without coming to grips with the basic features of our society is a key ideological concern of both the women's and gay movements. Yet there is a sense in which we should be suspicious of attempts to deny the centrality of sexuality in any discussion of liberation."^[73]

In his synthesis, Altman attempted to bridge the old-line gay culture of the 1950s and 1960s and the countercultural gay movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.^[74] The coming-out strategy, he argued, would politicize the gay identity of the 1950s and 1960s. Altman situated both the "old" gay culture and the "new" gay identity within the framework of Marcuse's and Brown's utopian sexual theory. In his concluding chapter "The End of the Homosexual?" Altman posited gay liberation as "part of a much wider movement that is challenging the basic cultural norms of our advanced industrial, capitalist, and bureaucratic individual consciousness and new identities and life styles." He concluded: "One hopes that the answer lies in the creation of a new human for whom such distinctions no longer are necessary for the establishment of identity. The creation of this new human demands the acceptance of new definition of man- and womanhood such as are being urged by gay and women's liberation."^[75]

Although many gay activists shared Altman's utopian sexual hopes, they chose a political strategy of encouraging people to come out and supporting that decision. The focus on coming out created a new type of gay politics. The public announcement of one's homosexuality became a sign of self-acceptance. As vast numbers of homosexuals felt encouraged to emerge from their closets, the movement grew until it achieved a political impact that the homophile movement never attained.

Coming out had two important effects. First, it allowed people to create a formal network serving a range of previously unsatisfied needs. The network included religious, educational, political, recreational, and professional organizations; newspapers and periodicals; social service institutions (e.g., counseling services); and mutual aid societies. Second, as people came out and mobilized, and as they formed community institutions, homosexuals gained an increasingly well-defined public identity.

Lesbians and gay men had to be visible before they could establish communities. Many homosexuals moved away from families and jobs or careers in which they could not be openly gay, and migrated to cities with visible lesbian and gay communities. Visible homosexuals created gay neighborhoods that resembled the urban neighborhoods of immigrant groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With their new visibility, homosexuals created political groups that influenced elections and gay-owned or gay-patronized businesses that thrived.

Among gay intellectuals in the mid-1970s, particularly those who had been active in the antiwar movement and the New Left, there was a movement to reclaim the historical and cultural experience of homosexuals in a way modeled on black intellectuals' recovery of black culture and history. In addition, gay historians soon discovered that many early participants of homosexual emancipation came from the political Left. Many lesbians and gay men had only a vague awareness that a homophile movement had existed before the 1969 Stonewall riots, and most were completely surprised to discover that homosexual emancipation movements had antedated World War II.

Probably the most important book to explore the homosexual experience in the United States was Gay American History by Jonathan Ned Katz. Published in 1976, this documentary history of homosexuality included material from 1528 through the mid-1970s. Influenced by the gay movement's moment of catharsis in the early 1970s, Katz wrote of homosexuals: "We were a people perceived out of time and out of place—socially unsituated, without a history. … That time is over. The people of the shadows have seen the light; Gay People are coming out—and moving on—to organized action against an oppressive society."^[76]

Katz's pioneering work unintentionally undermined the definition of homosexual identity that the movement had assumed. The section "Native Americans / Gay Americans" showed homosexual behavior embedded in societies in which men and women could change gender roles. Whereas switching gender roles implied that a person was homosexual, the sexual partner who had not changed gender roles was not stigmatized or labeled. Katz also categorized as homosexual some passionate male-male or female-female relations that may have had no homoerotic component at all—for instance, a passionate correspondence between Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens. The long history of coding homosexual feelings as "friendship" makes Katz's decision to include such material plausible but not necessarily valid. Katz's research also unearthed an important new category of deviants—women who passed as men to improve their wages or to travel. Undoubtedly, some of these were lesbians but many were not. In Gay American History , Katz intended to offer the history of homosexuals, but he also "rediscovered" the history of gender nonconformity and homosexual behavior. Katz adopted a contradictory approach, on the one hand presenting a history of homosexuals as a distinct and fixed minority and on the other espousing the radical historicism that all homosexuality is situational.

Finally, a group of activists and historians associated with a British journal called Gay Left (which existed from 1975 through 1979) articulated a history of the homosexual identity.^[77] Among this group, Jeffrey Weeks explored the implications of Mary McIntosh's 1968 essay "The

Homosexual Role" in a series of essays and in Coming Out , his history of homosexual politics in Britain. The Gay Left approach combined symbolic interactionist sociology (emphasizing socially created meanings in everyday life) with Marxist analysis.^[78] Weeks, Kenneth Plummer, and other Gay Left historians identified the specific social and economic conditions that permitted a homosexual subculture and its psychological-political outgrowth—the modern lesbian and gay male identity—to develop. They saw sexual identity as resulting from a historical process, not a natural one. In "Capitalism and Gay Identity," a theoretical essay, and in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities , a history of the pre-Stonewall gay movement, John D'Emilio also contributed to this analytical tradition.^[79]

This search for a theory of gay identity originated among gay Left intellectuals. Starting from an "ethnic model" of history that at first assumed an already existing identity or social group, they eventually discovered that homosexuals were historically constructed subjects. For these leftists, as well as for many other lesbian and gay activists, the theory of a lesbian or gay identity is believed to be both a description of reality and a normative basis for politics.

The lesbian and gay movements certify—politically and socially—the existence of the homosexual identity. The lesbian and gay contribution to transforming the sex/gender system was to split sexual object preference from gender and to legitimize the social construction of sexual identity by challenging the heterosexual assumption. These developments seriously weakened the cultural grip of the principle of consistency.

Identity, Transgression, And The Politics Of Difference

Lesbian and gay identities emerged from the political mobilization of a subculture that has started to recode the sexual significance of gender and sexual preference. The existence of large, visible, lesbian and gay communities has helped to institutionalize homosexual identities. To

extend the principle of consistency to include "sexual identity," and thereby homosexuality, is to create an uneasy alliance. This incorporation, however, has undermined the idea of a "natural" relationship between gender identity, family formation, and reproduction, which the principle of consistency signifies.

The cumulative modifications in the postwar American sex / gender system—the increasing independence of adolescents from parental control, the growing equality of women, and the political emergence of homosexuals—have threatened the beliefs and privileges of many Americans who, for religious or other reasons, are committed to traditional family patterns. In particular, the political mobilization of women and homosexuals during the 1970s threatened the economic and social status of the lower middle class and white Christian working class.

The New Right has tapped into the resentments that this postwar transformation has generated. Thus, this political group is the most recent political subject to emerge from the turmoil of the sexual revolution.^[80] In reaction, the New Right is attempting to restore the principle of consistency as natural law. Conservative critics of gay rights have argued that "the case for homosexuality is a vulgarization of a philosophical anarchism which denies the existence of nature." In their minds, advocating gay rights also denies that human bodies are better designed for heterosexual than homosexual intercourse, which should be overwhelmingly obvious.^[81] The principal of consistency as symbolic order or master code works only as long as society takes it for granted. The political mobilization of the New Right can only succeed in defending a particular sex / gender subculture. It cannot restore the heterosexual and paternalistic family form to its earlier position of unchallenged dominance.

The sex / gender arrangements that prevailed in America in 1940 have changed radically. World War II, the contradictory postwar demands for family discipline and mass consumption, and the grassroots political mobilizations by youth, women, and the New Right have all modified the sex / gender system.^[82] Like the gay movement, each of these mobilizations has created a particular form of political subjectivity.

Each form of political identity is, in turn, vulnerable to recodings due to shifts in age, social context, and political developments.

In the early stages of creating a collective subjectivity, politically mobilized homosexuals (or women, for example) adopted norms and codes of conduct that served as "recipes for an appropriate attitude regarding the self."^[83] These norms, often articulated in opposition to homophobia, provided a platform for politics and social criticism. They also responded to the personal distress and humiliation that homosexuals had suffered. Thus, the personal became the political. Although the initial political mobilization drew on these feelings of oppression, the lesbian and gay communities made tremendous political progress because so many individuals in the movement accepted their own homosexuality. The mobilization of homosexuals as collective subjects emphasized their shared experiences of oppression, and was therefore a militant affirmation of commonality.

Every form of political subjectivity, however, is only a relay that transports us from one point to another. Affirming shared experience within any group soon exposes limits and differences. Everyone's identity exists as the nexus in a web of opposing or merely different group affiliations and personal commitments. In gay politics, affirming shared experience resulted in the consolidation of homosexual differences. In this drive for affirmation, however, irremovable differences have emerged among the members of homosexual communities. Political action eventually provokes internal conflict or splits movements along the most significant social fault lines of a historical period—such as class, religion, race, or generation. Even an individual's identity is never completely harmonious or unified internally. This is the transgressive experience through which we discover the limits of our membership, our real heterogeneity. Thus, the politics of identity must also be a politics of difference. The politics of identity is a totalizing drive that attempts to universalize its norms and conduct; the politics of difference affirms limited and heterogeneous subjects.^[84] As intense and controversial sexual differences have emerged within the lesbian and gay male communities, new forms of sexual politics are developing throughout American society.