Gay Studies

The contemporary gay-rights movement is usually traced to the riots that began on June 28, 1969, when patrons at Manhattan's Stonewall Inn refused to submit to the lewdness arrests gay men regularly endured at the time. There were, however, liberal precedents in Henry Gerber's short-lived Society for Human Rights (1924), the first gay-rights organization in the United States, and Communist Party leader Harry Hay's homophilic Mattachine Society (1950) and its sister lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis (1955). Meanwhile, under the nose of McCarthyism a contentious, frequently prosecuted homosexual subculture newly awakened through avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's Fireworks (1947), Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch (1959), Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964), and the gay-positive "physique" artistry of Bob Mizer, Bruce Bellas, and Tom of Finland. But it was Stonewall's unprecedented militant visibility politics that delivered gays and lesbians from the closet and into the mainstream.

The years following 1969 witnessed the Gay Liberation Front; The Boys in the Band (1970), Hollywood's first gay film; John Murphy's Homosexual Liberation: A Personal View (1971); The Journal of Homosexuality (1974); and (heterosexual) psychologist George Weinberg's Society and the Healthy Homosexual (1972), whose neologism homophobia identified public prejudice, not the homosexual, as neurotic. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association—mainly to appease post-Stonewall politics—declassified homosexuality as a pathology in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), though the DSM-IV persists in recognizing a "gender identity disorder," implying that homosexual men and women are healthy only insofar as they respectively behave according to masculine-aggressive and feminine-passive gender stereotypes. In the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatry's patriarchal conservatism became a favorite target of lesbian feminists, most notably Monique Wittig, whose revolutionary declaration that lesbians were "not women" rejected Freud's mystifying construction of female sexuality and removed lesbians from the stifling female roles patriarchy had mandated.

In 1970 University of Nebraska professor Louis Crompton created academia's first gay studies class; in 1972 the first gay studies program in the United States was initiated at California State University, Sacramento. While initially gay studies sought to deconstruct the fallacious nineteenth-century medicalization of homosexuality (thus, the substitution of the nonstigmatic gay), and resist what Adrienne Rich would later call patriarchy's "compulsory heterosexuality," by the mid-1970s gay academics began turning to literature, resuscitating the tacitly recognized but largely unexamined homosexualities of authors whose canonical status could legitimize a tentative field susceptible to ridicule. The sexual orientations of Lord Byron, André Gide, Walt Whitman, and W. H. Auden were no longer incidental, but central to a critical literary approach to text, voice, subjectivity, and especially intentionality. Conservatives balked when gay scholars read Herman Melville's Billy Budd or Shakespearean sonnets as coded gay texts, but reader-response critics also argued that an author's sexuality was irrelevant, because all textual meaning is not received frozen from history but is an active, contemporary creation of a (sexually) empowered subjectivity. Nevertheless, a secondary gay canon emerged around definitively gay authors such as E. M. Forster, W. Somerset Maugham, Edward Carpenter, Jean Genet, and Gertrude Stein, and gay studies began intersecting with film studies to address the leftist gay cinemas of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rosa von Praunheim, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Derek Jarman. But only in the late 1970s and early 1980s, under the guidance of lesbian feminism and multiculturalism, would once-Eurocentric gay academia fully embrace the likes of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Djuna Barnes, and Langston Hughes.