Gay Movement

Contents

• The Term "Identity Movements"
• A Short History of the Gay Movement
• Texture of the Gay Movement
• Rhetorical Characteristics within the Gay Movement

The term "Identity Movements"

• One of the four types of movements we identified earlier
• Identity movements seek to enhance the acceptability of certain individual characeristics (color, sex, sexual perference) as definitions of who people are. Identities are composed of our arrangements of many characteristics we share with others in such a way that we isolate certain ones as a basis for how we self-identify. Identity movements promote the acceptability of characteristics shared by a portion of the population as a way to self-identify.
• The movements are built around a rhetoric which:
  • projects an audience with a shared and significant characteristic that the movement seeks to unite. In this process they rhetorically develop a name for this group that becomes a symbol of their identification with each other, their unity. Thus, those who embrace that characteristic, that name, unite their energy toward the movement.
  • declares discriminatory or exclusionary treatment of that group, and
  • declares the right to pride in the shared characteristic of that group as the sine qua non of the movement.
• Identity movements are born in resistance to normativity. One thing that a society's rhetoric does is define what is "normal" in that society. We perform praise and blame in rhetoric to promote the behaviors and characteristics that we think are good and necessary. These edge over into the comfort of expectations. Thus, our rhetoric marks the "normal" and the "abnormal." This rhetorical process is good since it discourages obnoxious behavior, but it is bad since it imposes a kind of intolerance that is visited on certain members of the community. Note this is a variation on the "double rhetoric" strategy that characterized feminism..
• Identify movements celebrate difference (the abnormal) as OK. They create a safe place for those with the characteristic that they celebrate. In the Gay movement that characteristic is sexual identity and who you love.
• Identity movements differ little from other social movements in terms of their social processes, but there is a difference in their rhetorical practices and their ideology.

A Short History of the Gay Movement

• The Gay movement can be mapped as the classic case of moving from private to public. Before the movement, intimate love for another of the same sex was said to be "in the closet." It was kept as private as possible. Gay people had to develop rituals to "find others." Society has many rituals through which male-female relationships can develop toward love and intimacy. But similar rituals for gays were lacking. They would have be "deviant." So, those Gays had to negotiate such rituals carefully so as not to stimilate the retribution of a normative society. In the process they would gradually carve out public spaces where they could meet similar others. The process of moving to these as public (a community of shared concerns) was the direction of the movement.

• Toward this end, there were scattered demonstrations in the 1960s. They tended to be only in certain cities: Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, Washington. They were within the context of the radicalism of the decade and the pattern of mass rallies characteristic of many movements.

• One of the events that is pointed to by many as the start of the Gay movement is the Stonewall Riot of 1969. One important public sphere for gays had become the gay bar, establishments, generally in large cities, where gay behaviors were accepted by management. The governments of these cities tended to go through cycles of (1) letting these places operate as gay bars; they were, after all, private businesses; (2) moving into pressure from public and governmental officials for the police to do something about them; and then (3) raids, often vicious, in which police tended to have license to punish patrons on the spot, either through arrest citing various sodomy statutes, or through violence. On 28 June 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village of New York, the third stage was reached. But the patrons resisted the police efforts. It became a symbol of oppression against gays.

• Other than New York, the most active central location for the movement (that was, remember, very decentralized) was San Francisco. Many radical movements of the 1960s prospered in San Francisco and the Gay movement was no different. The Vanguard Movement was organized there in 1965, and then a community of gays formed around the Castro District of San Francisco. This community had an economic and political energy as well as an energy toward positive identity. Members developed businesses catering to other gays, but to ordinary citizens as well. And the community began to get involved in San Francisco city politics and even state politics. The community became a magnet attracting more and more activism.

Emergence of Gay Movement

• Generally the gay movment was very dispersed. Small cohorts formed the public spheres that supported each other in the face of the weight of normativity. This was bottom-up. Generally no leadership.

• Beyond that, groups began to form locally. For example, the Vanguard formed in San Francisco as a community support organization in 1965.

• Some formal groups ultimately emerged.
  • Gay Liberation Front formed in 1969 following Stonewall. It sponsored mass rallies to promote gay pride.
  • Lesbian groups were spawned by feminism.
  • Late in the movement ACT-UP (AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power) was focused on AIDs when that epidemic emerged in the 1980s.
  • Generally these groups continued to provide support activities for identity and pride development.

Rhetorical Characteristics of Gay Movement

Media of the movement

• The dominant form was the development of friend circles into public spheres. This was a kind of consciousness raising, similar to that characterizing feminism.
• At times this moved to mass performance. Pride events included activities like cross-dressing and flounting of normative standards.
• Finally there were mass rallies in support of rights as the movement moved in a more integrative direction, particularly over gay marriage.

Intertextuality: The Analogy to Civil Rights

• The movement rhetoric was fond of borrowing strategies and overtly comparing itself to the African American civil rights movement. This analogy particularly became prominent as the more political push for rights (the integrative movement) emerged late in the movement's history.
• Gay pride did not match this civil rights connection with analogy to Black pride. This was probably because of the association of Black Pride with Black Nationalism.
• From the earlier movements, the personna of the oppressed was also accepted.

Developing Symbols of the Movement

• The Gay movement was particularly good at developing ways to symbolize their pride. This process is often called "the stealing of symbols." For example, they took the term "gay" which seemed to express a happiness remote from their day-to-day experience and turned it into a symbol representing who they were. The same with "queer," a word that was a slur that they accepted and turned into a source of pride.
• The rainbow flag was another symbol developed by the movement. This symbol emphasized the importance of diversity.
• The same thing sort of reversal of valuing occured on behavior. Behaviors judged obnoxious by normativity were converted into rituals of defiance and pride. The gay pride parade or high-heel races were examples. So were public displays of affection with those of the same sex.

Confronting Normativity

• One of the primary ways to confront normativity was the Theatre of the Queer. The movement produced open displays of their difference affirming that difference as good and worthy of pride. Cross dressing would be an example. Such activites were publicized and drew the press. Their productivity was debated.
• The fight against normativity was aided by the development of <diversity> as an ideograph. This ideograph became a way of celebrating the variety of life in the United States. It marveled at the diversity and presenting it as an American strength. "Only in this country, . . ." became a way of directly confronting normativity. Despire this development, the use of the ideograph was not common in the gay movement.