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3 Gay liberation 1969–73: praxis, protest and performance And the faggots won’t seem so funny . . . when the revolution comes1 The history of homosexuality has often presented gay activism as spontaneously erupting in a fit of excitement at the Stonewall Riots in June 1969. The riots are named after the bar where they took place, The Stonewall Inn, which was the most popular lesbian and gay venue in Greenwich Village, New York City. Its clientele were predominantly drag queens, butch lesbians and hustlers, and the riots were a reaction against ongoing police
Introduction In 2001, Gay Ireland , a new Irish magazine aimed at a male gay audience, launched a small-scale but significant billboard advertising campaign to announce its arrival. The poster featured two Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) players kissing, one wearing a Kerry jersey, the other a Dublin one. The caption read, ‘Relax, it’s a gay thing’. The campaign sparked angry complaints and prompted a torrent of radio-show call-ins, as well as a death threat to the offices of the Irish Advertising Standards Authority. According to Nicola Byrne
The article notes a trend towards low-key naturalism in twenty-first-century independent queer cinema. Focusing on work by Andrew Haigh, Travis Mathews and Ira Sachs, it argues that this observational style is welded to a highly meta-cinematic engagement with traditions of representing non-straight people. The article coins the term ‘New Gay Sincerity’ to account for this style, relating it to Jim Collins’s and Warren Buckland’s writing on post-postmodern ‘new sincerity’. At its crux, this new style centres itself in realism to record non-metropolitan, intimate and quotidian gay lives, while acknowledging the high-style postmodernism of oppositional 1990s New Queer Cinema.
4 Gay emancipation and queer counterpublics In 2013, two figures in Polish public life made homophobic claims that caused a scandal on a national level. The fact that both of these figures, one from politics and the other from the professional repertory theatre, are directly and intimately connected to 1989 as a transformative political moment in Polish history should not be divorced from the significance of their statements nor from the outrage that followed their publication. The events began when Lech Wałęsa (2013), leader of the Solidarity movement and a
This book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to rethink fundamentally the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Gay activists intersected with Trotskyism, Stalinism, the New Left, feminism and youth movements. As the slogan of the Gay Liberation Front proclaimed, ‘Come out, come together and change the world’. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the teenager in the 1950s, CND and the counter-culture of the 1960s, gay liberation, feminism, the Punk movement and the miners' strike of 1984 all helped to build a politics of identity. When AIDS and Thatcherism impacted on gay men's lives in the 1980s, gay politics came into its own. There is an assumption among many of today's politicians that young people are apathetic and disengaged. This book argues that these politicians are looking in the wrong place. People now feel that they can impact the world through the way in which they live, shop, have sex and organise their private lives. The book shows that gay men and their politics have been central to this change in the post-war world.
was gathered together by former Labour councillor Allan Horsfall at Church House in Salford in 1964 for the inaugural meeting of the North-Western Homosexual Law Reform Society (NWHLRS). 3 Paul Fairweather, who was the first gay men’s officer at the ‘loony left’ Manchester City Council (MCC) from 1984, placed Horsfall in a longer lineage – ‘of Peterloo [… and] the Pankhursts’. ‘There is a sense’, he said, ‘of Manchester as a radical centre.’ 4 These stories capture some of the straightforwardness and
TBA_C03.qxd 08/02/2007 11:20 AM Page 74 3 Gay rights, same-sex marriage and AIDS As the 2000 presidential election approached, George W. Bush’s gubernatorial record in Texas gave rise to mixed feelings among gay and lesbian campaigners. It seemed to have a contradictory character. At times, Bush and some of the other Republican governors appeared to be differentiating themselves from the Christian right by downplaying moral concerns and condemning the politics of ‘divisiveness’ (see pages 63– 4). In April 1999, Bush refused to join those Senate Republicans
near the beginning of Cesc Gay’s V.O.S. Clara has just given birth and Manu and Ander are eagerly awaiting the good news outside the delivery room. The two men are thrilled and while trying to decide which one will go in to see mother and baby first, they tell the nurse that one is the father and the other the husband. She is confused, and looks off screen, asking for an explanation. This moment announces both the film
commercialised sexual landscape in the decade of the Teddy Boy and the Suez Crisis and, in the process, rightly questioned the somewhat triumphalist and whiggish narrative of 1960s ‘permissiveness’, no one can deny that the visual, material and literary culture of queerness, embodied in the form of the physique magazine and other products, expanded dramatically in the years following the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. 4 As a new gay culture and politics took hold in the late 1960s and 1970s, the growing sense that same-sex-desiring men needed to produce ./figures
In Diverse Communities: the evolution of lesbian and gay politics in Ireland (1994) Kieran Rose charts the development of the movement for lesbian and gay rights in Ireland, from the founding of the Irish Gay Rights Movement in 1974 to the decriminalisation of sex between consenting adult men in 1993. Rose provides a precisely detailed but lively account of the lobbying campaign in the late 1980s and early 1990s directed towards securing decriminalisation. This account is intimately informed by his prominent role in that campaign. At the