The Queer/Gay Assimilationist Split: The Suits vs. the Sluts

Monthly Review, May, 2001 by Benjamin H. Shepard

Sexuality and Difference

Nothing divided the new liberationists from the homophiles more than strategies around the role of sex within the movement. For the homophiles (the predecessors to today's assimilationists), gay sexuality was something to keep quiet about or apologize for. For the liberationists, gay sex was something to revel within and create global solidarity around; "Perverts of the world unite!" was a central GLF anthem. Gay liberationists recognized that while many homosexuals claimed they were just like everyone else, the dominant culture did not see them that way. As such, gay liberation, in alliance with women's liberation, created a vision of sexuality as cultural transformation. Autonomy of the body from the state was a central principle of both movements. Both movements questioned basic tenets of family structure and patriarchal authority in America. [6]

For liberationists, "gay" was a revolutionary identity capable of disarming institutions which pathologized sexuality: teachers, psychiatrists, police. Their movement would free us all from the shame, guilt and sin that attached to sexual activity and would expose the rigidities of gender to be historical constructs within our means to dissolve. David Pattent, an AIDS activist who came out in the seventies, suggests, "Gay Liberation was about more than just coming out as queer, it was about allowing all people to come out as who they are.

Former GLFerJack Nichols recalls his vision of the era: "I began hoping-in contrast to the ghetto separatists--for a final melting of gay/straight divisions and the creating of a sexually integrated society in which everybody would be free to love and make love without self identifying though specialized sexual labels." Sex roles and monolithic categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality were bound to fade within a potential bisexuality. Instead of serving as a tool for production or an indicator of social status, sexuality was understood as something pleasurable and relational. Queer theory of a generation later would build on the vision of emancipated sexuality articulated within the cultural conversation created during gay liberation.

And, of course, the idea of a liberated, uncategorized sexuality was a tremendous threat to institutionalized heterosexuality/normativity, defined against what it is not--queer--more than what it is for. Despite the GLF's positioning as a "unisexual" group, many lesbians were torn between gay liberation and the women's movement "We have to have our chance as women to realize where we are. We're here because we do relate to men's and women's gay liberation, but we must reserve the right to make certain decisions ourselves," one woman in GLF explained. A number of women left GLF over differing notions of what exactly sexual liberation meant and in frustration with chauvinism in the group. GLF would not survive these tensions, but the liberation movement broke out in dozens and then hundreds of countries around the world. The breakdown of GLF went along with a shift to separatist positions between gay men and lesbians, gay and women's liberation. Nonetheless, throughout the rest of the 1970s an obvious self interest in mutual support--e.g., not to have two pride parades--disguised that fact.