American Homo

Community and Perversity

Jeffrey Escoffier

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781788732314
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788732321
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

American Homo offers a sweeping interpretation of the political, cultural and economic struggles of lesbian, gay and bisexual people to reveal how sexual minorities have challenged and changed American society. These provocative essays by long-time activist, writer, and theorist Jeffrey Escoffier tracks the lesbian and gay movements across the contested terrain of American political life. Starting from an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women, LGBT movements have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and virulent outbreaks of homophobic populism. Escoffier explores how every new success-whether it's civil rights, marriage, or cultural recognition-also enables new disciplinary and normalizing forms of domination, and why only the active exercise of democratic rights and participation in radical coalitions allows LGBT people to sustain both the benefits of community and the freedom of sexual perversity.

Part One Sexual Revolution

Contemporary lesbian and gay studies, particularly in the form of queer theory, has focused on how culture can and cannot represent homosexuality. But queer theory and cultural studies cannot grasp the basic causes of social change in history. It cannot explain, for example, the emergence of the modern homosexual identity in western Europe or North America. Nor can it account, with any degree of historical pertinence, for the dating of its emergence or the spatial patterns of its diffusion. Lyotard has argued that we are living in a period in which the grand narratives of modernity can no longer make sense of people’s experience.¹ Although the credibility and, perhaps even more significantly, the legitimacy of historical explanations have fallen into question, we cannot understand many of the contemporary political or social issues concerning homosexuality without attempting a theoretical and historical account.

Virtually all the essays in this book can be understood as explorations of “sexual revolution”—that long process of change in the U.S. sex/gender system.² This revolution—like the first industrial revolution—has been an immense and contradictory process stretching out over the life span of two generations. In studying the sexual revolution, one must take into account the point made by Perry Anderson: “There is no plumb line between necessity and contingency in historical explanation, dividing separate types of enquiry—‘long-run’ versus ‘short-run’ or ‘abstract’ versus ‘concrete’—from each other.”³

Since World War II, the political mobilization of youth, women, and homosexuals has transformed the social relations of gender and sexuality in America. The sex/gender system encodes biological capacities into the social and cultural patterns that shape our lives as gendered and sexual human beings.⁴ The term sexual revolution encompasses these changes in the sex/gender system and evokes a long war, including progressive changes as well as undesirable ones, enlightened reforms as well as conservative reactions. The term encompasses a whole series or cluster of interrelated gender and sexual phenomena such as abortion, sexual harassment, lesbian and gay rights, homophobic violence, modified gender roles, the feminization of love, machismo, and so on. It also refers to the struggle of movements and individuals to change sex and gender roles.⁵ As Jeffrey Weeks has noted:

Over the past generation, many of the old organizing patterns and controls have been challenged, and often undermined, and sexuality has come closer than ever before to the center of public debate. This has produced a crisis over sexuality: a crisis in the relations of sex, especially between men and women, but also perhaps more fundamentally, a crisis around the meaning of sexuality in our society. In the resulting confusion there has been an unprecedented mobilization of political forces around sexual issues.⁶

The essays in part 1 explore the social and economic conditions under which homosexuals have fashioned an identity and built a community. The sexual revolution is the broad historical context for these developments—whether they are economic patterns of behavior or the imagining of a homosexual social world. In chapter 1, “Sexual Revolution and the Politics of Gay Identity,” I sketch the historical sociology of the postwar American sex/gender system and the emergence of homosexual identity.

The social disruptions of World War II and postwar adjustments caused important shifts in sex/gender relations within American society. This essay identifies three historical moments: Kinsey’s discovery of the gap between sexual norms and behavior; the period in which Keynesian economic policies shaped sharply contrasting policies toward women, sexuality, and reproduction; and the sexual revolution and emergence of the women’s and gay movements.

The next essay focuses on the economic conditions that existed before the Stonewall riots and the emergence of the gay liberation movement. Chapter 2, “The Political Economy of the Closet,” explores how the stigma toward homosexuality reinforced the closet and made it essential to control information about one’s identity. Together, these conditions had a particular impact on the economics of homosexuality before Stonewall. Needing to conceal their homosexuality imposed extraordinary economic burdens on gay men and lesbians. It also made homosexuals vulnerable to various forms of extortion and protection rackets. The post-Stonewall process of coming out was the only political strategy that could modify the “economic” oppression of lesbians and gay men.

Imagining a social life allowed homosexuals to envision a more “normal” life—one free from the distorted psychological stereotypes that characterized the homophobic discourses of the 1950s and early 1960s. Chapter 3, “Homosexuality and the Sociological Imagination,” studies the dozen or so popular sociological books on homosexuality published between 1951 and 1968. The sociological emphasis of those books about homosexuality was relatively new and signified the postwar discovery of the existence of the gay and lesbian communities. Since there are no readership statistics or surveys that allow us to gauge this literature’s significance to homosexuals in the 1950s or 1960s, I have drawn on my own experience. I try to understand the relationship a reader might have had to that body of literature and reconstruct my own reaction to the idea of a gay identity and community. Finally, I evaluate the psychological and political significance of “the discovery of the social” by tracing its significance for myself as a young homosexual.

One element of the “sociological imagination” so necessary even to theorize about homosexuality is the recognition that large-scale, impersonal, historical processes—such as economic forces and social structure—shape the context in which we act and represent ourselves. To some degree, Marx’s famous comment that human beings “make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing” exemplifies this perspective. Both the political project of “making history” of homosexuals and the intellectual project of “making knowledge” of homosexuality inevitably occur in circumstances over which we have little control. We can only negotiate the longue durée by conjointly exercising our capacities to act and to think historically.

1SEXUAL 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.

This chapter is a slightly revised version of an essay originally published in Socialist Review, no. 82/83, vol. 15, nos. 4/5 (July-October 1985).

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Sexual Revolution
• Part Two: Intellectuals and Cultural Politics
• Part Three: From Identity Politics to Radical Democracy
• Conclusion: Meditations in an Emergency
• Notes
• Index