The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac by Clayton Howard;

Author:Clayton Howard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Privacy and Conflict Within Queer Communities

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, two formerly parallel trends in LGBT activism collided over the issue of privacy. On one hand, a largely middle-class and white contingent of gay men and lesbians entered mainstream American politics. Most notably, gay liberals became key members of the Democratic Party. SIR helped pioneer this transition in San Francisco, convincing a growing number of local politicians to support their cause. On the other hand, new LGBT groups proliferated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many of these organizations identified with the more radical wings of second-wave feminism and antiwar movement and expressed skepticism about mainstream institutions.97 Local manifestations of this kind of Gay Liberation in San Francisco included diverse groups, but they shared a fundamental distrust of any organizing strategy that overly relied on sexual privacy. Some of these radicals argued that “privacy” was merely another word for “shame.” They reversed longstanding middle-class discourses about urban vice and called for queer people to “come out” and build a sexual democracy “in the streets.” Others saw the discourse as insufficient for overcoming queer poverty. Activists in the Tenderloin, in particular, argued that having the right to have consensual sex in private did little for people who literally had no bedrooms. Many radicalized lesbians, meanwhile, argued that privacy only reinforced notions about the importance of the home that men used to oppress women. At the dawn of the 1970s, therefore, LGBT activists achieved some important victories, but they also fought one another over the meaning and nature of the right to privacy.

These conflicts surfaced, in part, thanks to SIR’s arguments that gay people needed to organize and vote in their self-interest. This view assumed that lesbians and gay men shared more similarities than differences, and Society members believed that if they united, SIR could force elites in San Francisco to support their cause at the ballot box. They knew that elected officials believed supporting any notion of gay rights was risky, and thus they tried to use the growing number of self-identified gay men and lesbians in San Francisco to their advantage. In 1967, Society President Dorr Jones argued that “one possible and powerful solution to the daily problems we face in our private lives is the development of a strong political force.”98

SIR, therefore, organized “candidates’ nights” to push San Francisco politicians to support gay rights, and from the very outset, these campaign events dramatized the possibilities and limits of a privacy-based political strategy. Few politicians wanted to speak to the group in the mid-1960s, but SIR forced many of them to see gay voters as a united bloc that could swing elections. Over time, SIR won the support of State Assemblyman Willie Brown, Supervisor Jack Morrison, State Senator John Burton, and, most dramatically, Board of Supervisors President Dianne Feinstein.99 Feinstein, a married Pacific Heights resident, had voted against a policy that would have forbidden ex-convicts from having homosexual relationships while she served on a parole board. When

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