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

Monthly Review, May, 2001 by Benjamin H. Shepard

In the following years, the gay liberation movement become more and more institutionalized. The struggle shifted from grassroots community groups to legal battles in the hands of lawyers. In 1973, The Advocate, a gay newspaper, editorialized that the gay liberation movement should be run by "responsible, talented, experts with a widespread financial backing from all strata of the gay community." The problem was that a politics of respectability required a basic trust in just that capitalist social structure that only a couple of years earlier GLF had described as sexist, racist, and homophobic. Many had become queer not to fit in. Countless gays, lesbians and queers, particularly gender/fetish, SM, leather, or transgender communities had very little interest in fitting into the status quo. A conflict between the suits and the sluts would characterize much of the history of the GLBT movement and its inherent divides.

Battling the Right

The first national gay and lesbian march on Washington was held in 1979. The march was a challenge to the first incarnations of the Christian Right which were taking the gay freedom movement very seriously. The Reagan election of 1980 produced a significant threat. And by the early 1980s it was clear that the AIDS epidemic was threatening the very existence of queer communities: assimilationists, activists, homophiles, and quiet closeted types alike. Everyone. The 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick Supreme Court decision upholding the ancient and vicious pre-liberation sodomy laws confirmed a widespread cultural attack against both gays and lesbians.

The AIDS quilt, a collection of individual memorial quilts for those who had died of the virus, was first unfolded at the 1987 march on Washington. The quilt's presence, organized by former Harvey Milk aide Cleve Jones, symbolized a continuity of the struggle from the 1979 march and movement. Old time gay liberationists and first time activists converged for the march. Sixty-four people were arrested for stopping traffic in front of the White House as the Names Quilt was laid out for the first time. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was but three months old. For a brief moment, gay and queer worlds, radicals and incrementalists, united against the governmental indifference to the epidemic. [7] Long-time organizer Leslie Cagan recalled: "It was an extremely powerful day because there was a kind of unity in our communities that the AIDS crisis had helped bring about." It was in the context of the AIDS crisis that many lesbians and gay men started working together again.

For the next three years, ACT UP merged its anger with the legacy of Gay Liberation, snatching the gay movement out of the hands of an assimilationist civil rights lobby. The group's 1989 Stonewall 20 rally clearly marked the link between AIDS and queer activism. For a brief moment, AIDS activism, and the social justice activism driving it, were linked with queer activism. AIDS topped the GLBT civil rights agenda. Carrying a banner reading: "The Tradition, Lesbians and Gay Men Fighting Back!" marchers chanted: