Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis

Author:Sophie Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Gay and Lesbian—and Children’s—Liberation

Few missed historic opportunities frustrate me more than the neglect of Shulie and her movement to link up—theoretically and practically—with Gay Liberation, the burgeoning parallel insurgency that championed the economic, sexual, and gender freedoms of young people, and attacked the private nuclear household “from the outside” (as Gay activists often put it). Opportunities for solidarity and conspiracy against the family had surely been presenting themselves from the early 1900s: the Euro-American family kept producing great numbers of fugitives in the form of girls and women fleeing rape, abuse, battery, or simply marriage, and homosexual, trans, or intersex youth kicked into the streets by their parents. Had the family abolitionism of Gay Lib collaborated, durably, with the family abolitionism of Women’s Lib and Black Power, it seems to me, the lesbian-coined principle of “mothering against motherhood” (Adrienne Rich)69 could have taken on new, gender- and whiteness-abolitionist potency. As it stands, we have largely disjointed genealogies of distinct oppressed communities’ efforts to “learn to mother ourselves” (Audre Lorde’s later phrase).70 Writes queer historian Michael Bronski: “In the gay slang of the 1950s and ’60s, an older gay man would be called ‘mother’ if he took on the task of guiding or advising newly-out young gay men.”71 The popularity of a positive (let alone utopian) theory of any-gendered mothering dwindled, however, as Gay organizing was forced, later in the century, into reacting to the catastrophic state of exception, community emergency, and hospice care-scarcity that was AIDS.72

Officially, Gay Liberation kicked off at Compton’s Cafeteria, San Francisco, in August 1966, when drag queens and trans women associated with a group called Vanguard rioted against the policemen who systematically bashed and persecuted them.73 The movement then went global in June 1969 with the anti-police riot at the Stonewall Inn, New York. In 1970, Stonewall veterans and Gay Liberation Front militants Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Bambi L’Amour, Bebe Scarpi, and others founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Leaning on a Mafia acquaintance with real estate connections, they held a fundraiser and opened the transgender commune STAR House in the East Village, where the older transfeminine hustlers mothered dozens of newer refugees from the heteropatriarchal family at a time, building “Gay Power” and saving the lives of many transfeminine and/or queer youths they referred to as their “kids.”74 Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the SDS organizer Carl Wittman was writing “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,” in which he called on gays to aspire to more than “gay ghettos” and praised the emergence of “gay liberation communes,” stating: “we must govern ourselves, set up our own institutions, defend ourselves, and use our won energies to improve our lives.”75 Concurrently, given their pathologization by experts (and even psychiatric torture and incarceration), gay and lesbian activists threw themselves into organizing “mad pride,” patients’ liberation and “anti-pyschiatry.” A conference entitled “Schizo-Culture” united queers and neurodivergent “sickos” in challenging the power of parents and doctors.76

While precariously housed trans sex workers of color built technologies of survival in the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.