Acknowledgements
I want to thank my family, my mom, my dad, Thalia and Sophia for their support and many hours of watching CSI. I am ever-indebted to my wife, Usnea. Thanks to my companion Jordan Kirk, the only person I could have a truly homosexual relationship with. Thank you to Elos Cutter for many a back porch theoretical examination. Bridget Clancy, Andrea Christopher, Maya Rowland and others for keeping me honest and making me go out. Adele Carpenter, Tuesday Smillie, Michelle O’Brien, Valentine, and Nicholas Clarkson for being colleagues in queer theorizing outside the classroom. Thanks to Leah, Parker, Lana, Jen, Kate, Sarah T., Megan, Nansi, and everyone here at Reed College for solidarity. Fureigh for many offers of food and brainy insights, Carole for taking me in, and Arini for dinner. Amelia for cadre support, transcribing some interviews, and brilliant copy-editing. Silke Akerson for reviewing my draft and long walks. Also, thanks to Collette Gordon for insights and cupcakes. Thank you to Dana for taking it to the next level with me, welcoming me into her life for two full weeks of data collection in San Francisco.
Thank you to Erich Steinman, for extensive guidance and support throughout this process. Also, thanks Marc Schneiberg for giving attention when I demanded it. I am grateful to my third and fourth readers, Jacqueline Dirks and Pancho Savery, for extending themselves and providing extensive line edits on my drafts. Thanks to the R.W. Hodge Fund for its financial support for my thesis data collection, and the Undergraduate Initiative Research Committee for financially supporting my data collection. Jim Van Buskirk, Program Manager at the San Francisco Public Library James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, thanks for connecting me to resources and being excited about my project. Anne Lorimer for recommending literature, Michael Raey for meeting with me about interviews, and Kyriell Noon for consultation. I’m grateful to Susan Stryker for sarcastically telling me my project is bankrupt. I’m grateful to Lisa Moore for taking time out to read over my draft and for your guidance in my last year.
More than anyone else I am grateful to the participants who were generous with their time, took risks with speaking frankly and trusted me with their activist histories in a time of often terrifying political repression. I was repeatedly challenged, surprised, and delighted by the folks whom I interviewed for this project. Thank you.
A Note on My Use of Language
Precision in language is vital to discussing queer politics. Within this thesis, I use “LGBT” to refer to the umbrella encompassing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities. I use the term “queer” to refer both to a specific political action logic and to individuals who self-identify as queer; which use I am employing should be clear from the context. Both of these identity classifications are narrowed in my categorization of organizations as “mainstream LGBT” and “oppositional queer.” When I use the term “mainstream LGBT,” I am referring to a complex tangle of associated features. It implies an interest group politics that pursues movement goals within established political channels and defines goals in accordance with a minority or essentialist understanding of group identity. When I use the classification “oppositional queer,” I am referring to a contentious politics that uses non-institutional tactics in order to advance goals consistent with a liberationist ideology aiming to liberate all oppressed people. These categories will be complicated and deepened by this thesis. While the imposition of binary classifications risks polarizing and oversimplifying complex issues, I found these classifications useful for describing already extant ambiguous categories that are continually constructed and deconstructed via social movement activity.
Attention to self-identification of participants is another dimension of responsiveness to precise language. Participants were asked to self-identify their gender, sexuality, age, class, race, and whether or not they are disabled, and only their words are used in my descriptions and tables. Within the interviews, I explicitly asked participants what pronoun they would prefer I use, and my use of pronouns reflects the stated desires of participants. Because some of these preferences step outside of the bounds of “he” and “she,” I want to familiarize the reader with these alternative innovations that adjust a two-gender system to accommodate a fuller array of gendered possibilities. Some participants requested that I use both masculine and feminine pronouns, switching back and forth as I referred to them. Some participants requested that I use “they” and “them” as gender-neutral pronouns. Adherence to these pronoun preferences is essential to any project hoping to study queer, genderqueer and transgendered individuals and groups.
Abstract
What is the role of pronounced conflict within social movements? Extensive internecine criticism is discounted as deleterious infighting within scholarship and by many activists themselves. While such views seem to be self-evident, they rest on unexamined assumptions. Is conflict inherently destructive or counterproductive? How do activists themselves think about extensive and sometimes personalized criticism of other activists and organizations? Drawing upon but critiquing social movement theory, I argue that while conflict may produce organizational crises and burnout, it also produces new social movement activity. In-movement criticism may generate organizations, produce protests, and contribute to oppositional identity construction. Thus, engaging in criticism may function as a form of social movement activity. However, such productive aspects of criticism are easily overlooked by social movement scholarship, particularly if criticizers fail to advance formal political goals or target movement opponents. Similarly, cultural and emotional benefits of issuing criticism are easily overlooked. I use data from 17 in-depth interviews to explore the roles of conflict in the context of LGBT and queer efforts for change. Based on the interview data and within an in-depth historical contextualization, I argue that oppositional queer groups are born out of criticism of LGBT interest group and identity-based organizing. Queer groups’ tactics draw power from a shared understanding of the LGBT movement’s logic and tactics. I draw upon interviews with both oppositional queer activists and mainstream LGBT activists to argue that the emergence of oppositional queer activism is a productive result of criticism that illustrates the generative power of oppositional identity construction.
This thesis is dedicated to my family: Gabriel Shannon, Stephen Sady, Thalia Sady, and Sophia Sady.
Introduction: Criticism in Context
Serious consideration of queerness as a logic of action can force important revisions in approaches to collective identity formation and deployment and their relationship to political gains. First, it calls attention to the fact that secure boundaries and stabilized identities are necessarily not general, but in the specific – a point current social movement theory largely misses. The link between the two logics, the ways in which the American political environment makes stable collective identities both necessary and damaging, is sorely undertheorized and underexamined (Gamson, 1995: 402-3).
Joshua Gamson asserts that the “queer dilemma” brought to bear on social movement theory is that the destabilization of collective identity may itself be a goal and accomplishment of collective action (1995: 403). He compares this impulse to removing a rug from under one’s own feet. This seemingly self-destructive impulse serves as the object of my study. I sought to account for oppositional queer groups leveling scathing criticisms against mainstream LGBT organizations. I found that oppositional queer groups use the tools of identity-based organizing in order to destabilize the goals and tactics of mainstream LGBT groups. Because mainstream LGBT groups aim to embrace diverse identities, queer challenges to interest group politics resonate with in-group authority. Thus oppositional queers’ shared lexicon and the common tactic of identity deployment, matched with their identities as supposed beneficiaries of LGBT activism, imbues oppositional queer activists’ criticisms with meaning. Internally, criticism serves as a mechanism for boundary construction through which oppositional queers distinguish themselves from mainstream LGBT individuals, fortifying a reflexive “anti” identity. The external critique on the movement and the internal solidarity building combine as products of scathing criticisms.
In my first chapter, I draw on political process theory and the literature of “culturalist” scholars who critique social movement theory for its failure to account for forms of protest that appear to be at odds with social change. I then narrow my focus to scholars who elaborate the role of identity in collective action and the particular intensification of self-representation in identity political movements, resulting in identity proliferation and internecine conflict that is considered detrimental to social action. I then move to literature considering the queer action logic in order to expand on how identity proliferation and the destabilization of identity categories can be understood as productive or generative. Having reviewed relevant literature, I present my hypothesis, suggesting that criticism and talking trash are political acts, and that they generate social movement activity. I detail my methodology and give a rationale for case selection, outlining the in-depth interview process and how I drew 17 activists from both oppositional queer and mainstream LGBT organizations in Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California. I end the first chapter with short descriptions of each of these organizations and a note about the troubles of classifying queer and LGBT activism within the same movement.
In my second chapter, “The Queer Intervention,” I provide a brief history of the emergence of queer activism as marked by the emergence of Queer Nation in 1990 as an offshoot of the radical AIDS direct action group ACT UP. The history I provide is a critical re-evaluation of sociologist Elizabeth A. Armstrong’s account of queer movement emergence. Through this critical history I illustrate the early queer movement’s influence on the tactics and identities of present-day oppositional queer organizations. I end my history chapter by touching on styles of political action particular to gay, LGBT, and queer activism: the use of camp humor and the act of shaming.
In my third chapter, “Talking Trash,” I use data from 17 in-depth interviews to describe the nature of critique: breaking it down into personal indictments and stories of scandal, both styles of critiquing in conversation within groups. I also describe direct actions designed to “crash the party” of LGBT groups. These actions demonstrate how critique operates external to oppositional queer groups. After establishing the modes of critique, I discuss the content of oppositional queer critiques that object to minority model organizing toward citizenship rights such as equal marriage for LGBT individuals. With the mode and content clarified, I turn to participants’ explicit understandings of conflict, as participants have intentions when issuing criticism and are conscious of its effects. I outline explicit understandings of criticism held by oppositional queer and mainstream LGBT groups. Then I move to the dynamics that were not explicitly identified by participants as produced by criticism, but I found to be outcomes of the same practice. These dynamics include inaction and organizational crises, and affect mainstream LGBT and oppositional queer groups differently.
In my fourth and final chapter, I discuss the dynamics at play between criticized and criticizing organizations. The conflict-centered interactions between these two types of groups are open-ended, as LGBT participants ignore, defuse, or incorporate critiques. When incorporated, oppositional queer groups tend to reject incorporation. Thus, the interactive relationship is unresolved. In the second part of the final chapter, I delve further into the function of criticism in shoring up oppositional queer identity. Once again using my interview data, I discuss the ways that oppositional queer activists fortify radical identity and thereby sustain the possibility of ongoing critique by talking about distinctions and criticizing a mainstream LGBT “other.” I also found that participants constructed boundaries within oppositional queer culture, and I touch on this other side of oppositional queer identity construction. In my conclusion I summarize my findings, expound upon possible generalizations of my findings and reflect on the shortcomings of my research project.
Chapter One: Social Movement Theory and Identity Movements
Structure, Rationality, Culture, and the State in Social Movement Theory
In-movement targeting of mainstream organizations by oppositional groups suggests a quandary for social movement scholarship, which traditionally has regarded social movement activity as a challenge to state power posed by excluded groups. At this juncture in social movement scholarship, political process theory is the dominant model for collective action. Political process theory emerged as a twofold critique. It responded first to the shortcomings of classical models that framed social movement activity as the result of psychological distress. Additionally, political process theory addressed the inadequacies of resource mobilization theory, which aims to correct the emphasis on individual deprivation in classical models in order to account for collective action. Resource mobilization theory focused on resources critical to generating collective action, arguing that grievances are not sufficient to spur movement activity and casting movement participants as rational actors reliant on elites and resources. Doug McAdam (1982) critiques resource mobilization theory in his presentation of political process theory. He argues that resource mobilization theory fails to examine the risks attendant to relying on elites: the threat of withdrawal of support and cooptation (1982: 27-29). Instead, McAdam stresses the importance of a mass base accompanied by the understanding that oppression is both unjust and subject to change as causal variables lost in the overextension of the term “resources” (1982: 34). McAdam asserts that excluded groups can produce and sustain collective action, but are constrained by environmental factors. Thus, activity is reliant on interplay between internal organizational strength and the changing structure of political opportunities, culminating in an intersubjective understanding of grievances and the possibility for change that McAdam calls “cognitive liberation” (1982: 39-51). McAdam’s model for collective action provides for the social construction of some constraints, and also factors in environmental openness, but turns the attention of subsequent social movement scholars away from forms and factors involved in collective action projects that are absent from his model.
A vibrant body of literature aimed at reclaiming concepts undervalued by structuralist and rationalist social movement theory demonstrates the limitations of political process theory in explaining cultural goals and tactics. Culturalist scholars champion social movements that are not adequately accounted for by political process theory, such as animal rights and AIDS activism (Groves, 2001; Jasper, 1997; and Gould, 2000 and 2001). .Mary Bernstein argues that political process theory both does not extend to social movement activity, which “appears to be at cross-purposes with policy change,” and fails to legitimate cultural activity aimed at reproducing identity (1997: 534). For Bernstein and others, political process theory has led scholars of social movements to discount cultural goals, prefiguritive politics, and activity based on voicing dissent or expressing moral outrage (Bernstein, 1997; Armstrong and Bernstein, 2004; Jasper, 1997; Polletta, 2002). For example, Armstrong and Bernstein criticize political process theory and its revisions for continuing to define protest only as activity targeting the state, and suggest definitions for social movement activity that include actors targeting any authority, not just state or institutional authority (2004: 12). Their revision would account for protest targeting sources of authority from within a social movement. On a similar note, Francesca Polletta argues that some groups have been overlooked by scholars of social movements due to the perception of participatory democratic structures as hostile to “considerations of political efficacy” (2002: 203). This leaves an oversight in social movement scholarship regarding organizational innovations such as participatory democracy: a form of decentralized consensus-based decision-making, which aims to mitigate organizational cooptation. Polletta (2002) argues that participatory democratic forms of organizations are designed to maintain the group’s accountability to its members by resisting engagement with the political structure, which may lead to accountability to and emulation of that structure. By overlooking groups who refuse such engagement, the literature is biased toward groups directly addressing the political structure and away from “prefigurative” organizations, whose visions of the world are realized through how the organization is run. For prefigurative organizations, where the way in which a meeting is run is imbued with powerful political meaning, critiques and attacks may be integral to organizational operation (Polletta, 2002). Such an oversight in the literature makes scholarship vulnerable to dismissing the dynamics of infighting as apolitical or damaging, because intra as well as inter-organizational criticisms do not appear to advance “political” change.
Identities and Identity Construction in Social Movements
There is no consensus in social movements literature on the role of collective identity. However, identity is relevant to all social movement organizing in that shared identities as oppressed workers or citizens, for example, provide a basis for shared grievances, and identity as activists develops with participation. While identity plays a role in all social movement organizing, it has not been sufficiently elaborated upon by literature approaching social movements. Culturalists critique social movement scholarship for only dealing with identity insofar as it has a functional relationship to what are considered legitimate goals, such as member recruitment or strategic deployment aimed at policy change. Culturalists claim that this biases scholarship to dismiss important dimensions of social movement activity (Bernstein, 1997; Gamson, 1995; Taylor and Whittier, 1992; Jasper, 1997; Polletta, 2002). Further, scholars assert that movement participation and identity development are co-constitutive; Gamson (1995) critiques existing social movement literature for presuming that identity is a pre-existing resource. Armstrong and Bernstein join in the criticism, writing, “an approach that treats categories as natural often misses that even the most seemingly materialist attempts to address unequal distribution of valuable societal resources are generally also struggles over social honor and classification” (2004: 17). Thus, they argue, identity is implicated in many movements that have not been labeled as identity movements, and categorization is actively constructed instead of springing from essential traits. Additionally, culturalists argue that identity as activists influences social movement activity. Polletta claims that groups develop collective identity around tactics or the organization of meetings, arguing that groups may continue using a strategically useless tactic because it has been integrated into group identity (2002: 22). Jasper (1997) adds that participants may choose tactics because they are familiar or because they identify with them. In sum, identity is an important aspect of any collective action project; identity categories are not fixed, but are contested and generated through social movement activity, and further, social movement actors may integrate forms of protest into their identities. Identities are contested and created via social movement participation, and also profoundly affect social movement activity.
Identity Politics
Particularly in social movements premised on identity politics, social movement actors’ subject positions are crucial. Even more than a shared socio-structural location that often grounds other types of movements, collective identities are premised on shared experiences, providing the bases for collective grievances and positive identity building projects. Tactically, identity categories supply legitimacy when speaking to the interest of a racial, sexual, or gender group, or can be deployed strategically in order to influence movement outcomes. Thus, while all social movements involve participants with multiple identities that carry varying degrees of meaning, the logic of identity politics requires participants to subvert other identities to the supremacy of one “master identity.” In the LGBT movement, the master identity is sexuality (Armstrong, 2002: 136). This power invested in identity raises the stakes around identity, increases complexity, and places identity at the center of conflict. Self-representation is hotly debated in many identity-based social movements because emphasis on likeness or difference impacts the reception of the wider public, a consideration with different implications depending on goals.
The dialectical relationship between identity construction and collective action suggests the political significance of explicit criticism within the gay movement. Mary Bernstein’s (1997) analysis of identity deployment helps account for personal attacks and the attention given to individual consumption choices featured in oppositional queer critiques. Bernstein defines “identity deployment” as “expressing identity such that the terrain of conflict becomes the individual person so that the values, categories, and practices of individuals become subject to debate” (1997: 537-8). Detailed criticisms of individuals and organizations may appear petty or unrelated to social movement activity. However, when identity is the plane on which debate takes place, these seemingly inconsequential details are charged with political relevance. Thus, identity deployment provides a framework for understanding why criticizing the consumption habits of politicians and executive directors is a political activity for those engaged in the talk. Additionally, identity deployment accounts for why these critiques are potent when leveled against LGBT movement participants, who share this understanding of individual values and practices. This generates an informal agreement premised in identity deployment as a major tactic where individual practices and values are subject to vehement contestation.
In addition to explaining why personal identities and practices may be vested with special potency within a movement that uses identity as both a basis and a tool for organizing, Bernstein elaborates on the manners in which identity can be deployed. She offers analytically distinct dimensions of identity: identity for empowerment, identity as goal, and identity as strategy (further divided into identity for critique and identity for education). Identity for critique is a sub-category of identity deployment that confronts the values, categories, and practice of the dominant culture (1997: 537). Positive affirmations of stigmatized identity, such as “Black is Beautiful” in Black Power, or the rhetorical strategy of reclaiming stigmatized terms such as “crip” by Disability Rights activists, emphasize difference and challenge mainstream ideals. Identity for education emphasizes similarity with the majority, downplaying the differences that distinguish members of a minority group. These “assimilationist” identity presentations often correspond with social action adhering to institutionally condoned channels for voicing grievances. “Assimilationist” is a term that suits both social movement actors deploying identity for education, and members of a minority group who downplay difference and seek mainstreaming goals not intending political effects. Assimilation is a complex and contested phenomenon in regards to racial identity, sexual identity, transgender identity, and other identity-based forms of organizing.
Considering the meaningfulness of identity and self-representation in identity movements situates the vehemence of conflicts, like those over assimilationism, that have been the hallmark of gay activism. Optimal identity deployment is harshly contested in LGBT activism, as it is torn between impulses to represent difference from and impulses to emphasize likeness with the dominant heterosexual culture. Debates about the best way to represent sexual difference are a long-time feature of LGBT organizing, with assimilationism or the emphasis on similarity running along politically accomodationist lines and emphasis on difference corresponding with militance. The dialectical relationship between accomodationism and militance, assimilationism and anti-assimilationism, forges identity categories through oppositional identity construction. Oppositional identity construction refers to the process by which identities are constructed by contrast to other groups. Oppositional identity construction is one mechanism by which identities are proliferated. In the following section, I explore two intertwined axes on which oppositional identities are constructed: identification with forms of activism and identification with marginalized groups.
Identity Proliferation
Some culturalists argue that the proliferation of different in-group identities takes place not just due to differing racial, class, or sexual identities, but also due to identifications with different forms of activism. Francesca Polletta notes the identity work of organization members shoring up their identities as distinct from organizations they see themselves as unlike; she shows that SNCC members distinguished themselves from social workers and do-gooders, questioning the relationship between programs aimed to “salve the pain of oppression” and radical change (2002: 98). This distancing was not limited to internal effects: it guided the types of projects the organization chose. Polletta shows how this distancing impacts how groups organize, taking the example of feminist groups’ use of collectivist organizing to dissociate themselves from masculine bureaucracy. She writes, “the association of a deliberative option with a particular group affects whether it is perceived as sufficiently radical or ideologically consistent and whether it is seen as practical, political, and efficacious.” (2002: 23). This assertion that strategic viability is socially constructed, and Polletta’s emphasis on the extent to which activists identify with organizational structure demonstrates how criticisms targeting another group’s organizational structure, especially when contrasted to a preferred structure, promote oppositional identity development along the axis of activism.
To many scholars, identity proliferation, conflicts over its deployment, and the intensity of oppositional identity formation associated with identity movements, produce deleterious conflict that wastes the energies of social movement actors. Barbara Ryan (1989) argues that ideology can be destructive when it is used to bolster identity. She cites interview evidence of “trashing,” harshly criticizing other activists’ politics, in the Women’s Movement (1989: 248). Ryan’s contention is that radical feminists adopted ideological purity in order to distinguish themselves from “establishment” women, bolstering their positive identities by using oppositional identity construction. Ryan claims that “competitive models of right thinking” generated by this boundary work between radical and non-radical activists is destructive (1989: 245). While Ryan argues convincingly that ideological disagreements in the Women’s Movement were really about identity, she does not present a convincing case that these disagreements were damaging. Her claim that “activists of this time period consider the impact of antagonistic group relations to be a major cause of many women leaving the movement” stands unsubstantiated within the text, especially when followed by assertions that liberal cooptation was responsible and that internal dissention due to organization was as much to blame as inter-group conflict (1989: 248). Overall, Ryan’s evidence shows that feminists have reappraised those conflicts as more about identity than ideology, but does not confirm that internal dissention is responsible for major member loss.
Ryan is not alone in accounting for movement failure with internal dissention. Arlene Stein (1992) argues that the destruction, due to factionalism, of a single cohesive lesbian political logic has decentered lesbianism. For Stein, these destructive forces are enacted through “border skirmishes” within lesbian feminism. She argues that what was problematic “was not so much that boundary-making took place, but that the discourse of the movement, rooted in notions of authenticity and inclusion, ran so completely counter to it” (1992: 558). Stein draws on Susan Krieger’s claims that “integralism” or the “yearning for totalizing identity” is intensified within communities where both desire for personal affirmation and desire for individuality are strong (1992: 558-9). The assertion is that social movements with logics of inclusion and unity sow the seeds of particularly intense border skirmishes. Taylor and Whittier agree, writing, “it is easy to understand how identity politics promotes a kind of cultural endogamy that, paradoxically, erects boundaries within the challenging group, dividing it on the basis of race, class, age, religion, ethnicity, and other factors” (1992: 113-114). Echoing Taylor and Whittier’s assertion that identity politics produce identities and, therefore, conflict over identities, Armstrong writes:
Ironically, the identity logic that produced a commitment to gay identity simultaneously heightened the salience of identity in society in general and created equally compelling commitments to racial, ethnic, and gender identities … the intensified commitment to identities in all these movements made the emergence of critiques of exclusion inevitable. (2002: 139)
The gay movement, with its identity political logic and tactics, generates identity challenges and promotes identity proliferation. Armstrong argues that the absorption of critiques neutralizes the threat posed to the movement, implicitly reinforcing the assertion that unity provides solidarity and undercutting the assertion that disunity may promote solidarity. In order to explore the assertion that identity movements generate critiques over exclusion, I critique Armstrong’s account of gay movement success in the face of the destructive threat of identity proliferation.
Identity Political Logic in Armstrong’s Account of the Gay Movement
The gay identity movement, since its synthesis into identity politics and interest group organizing in the mid-1970s, privileges certain interests within the gay movement: namely the interests of white, middle class, gay men or, within lesbian feminism, lesbians (Armstrong, 2002; Gamson, 1995; Stein, 1992; Vaid, 1995, to name a few). The gay movement’s marginalization of women and people of color has generated a vibrant discourse against gay identity politics that demand that members subsume identities such as race and gender under the master-identity of gayness. The actions of these activists have generated a number of organizations and actions that are often subsumed under the umbrella of the LGBT movement in historical accounts. Elizabeth Armstrong’s cultural-institutional account of the gay movement is no exception.
In Forging Gay Identities (2002), Armstrong argues that the gay movement’s political logic of “unity through disunity” resolved challenges of excluded groups and mended the fissures generated by “gay” and “lesbian” as primary identity categories. This dominant frame of the gay movement was flexible and compelling enough to promote crystallization of a lesbian and gay field. Armstrong’s findings differ from what most social movements theorists would claim, in that “the focus on identity building and identity elaboration has not proved to be paralyzing or divisive for the gay movement. Paradoxically, the unity and diversity of the gay community seem inextricably interconnected” (2002: 2). She argues that the cognitive frame of the gay movement promoted the survival of the movement both by interpreting interest group politics and commercial pleasure-seeking activity as contributing to the construction of gay identity, and by expanding to accommodate types of diversity for which the frame was originally never intended (2002: 23). Armstrong writes that the very values of the movement, which claimed to celebrate diversity but which really intended only to refer to sexual and ideological diversity among white gay men, provided the basis for the critique made by white lesbians, lesbians of color, and gay men of color when they were excluded from the movement (2002: 153). Armstrong argues that the cognitive frame of “unity through disunity” expanded to embrace and neutralize these critiques. I problematize Armstrong’s classification of these groups, suggesting that her measure of success may conceal another variable: movement participation due to conflict over exclusion and ideological disagreements. Armstrong considers the emergence of new organizations as testament to the strength of an identity-embracing frame, failing to account for organizations developed due to internal dissention and splintering or due to the mobilization of marginalized individuals in response to exclusion.
Elizabeth Armstrong acknowledges that the gay and lesbian movement is far from egalitarian, and that a unified movement does not follow from a frame of unity. However, Armstrong’s measure for the burgeoning gay and lesbian field may conceal splintering, conflict, and fragmentation. When constructing a database of gay organizations in San Francisco, Armstrong coded the organizations, including all organizations that state either in their name or in their mission statement that they are composed of either sexual or gender minority people. This includes “homosexual, homophile, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transvestite, transgender, leather, BDSM, or sex workers,” folding potentially autonomous or oppositional organizations into her measure for the gay movement (2002: 208). Armstrong collapses the development of gay identity organizations with organizations formed in protest to existing organizations or in response to rejection based on transgendered or bisexual identity. Thus, the more organizations developed in response to exclusion or as departures from the lesbian and gay movement, the more “gay” organizations Armstrong counts. This absorption of fracturing and conflict is consistent with the frame of the gay movement that Armstrong identifies, “unity through disunity,” but may disguise generative effects of in-movement contention.
The “Queer Dilemma”
The literature reflects that identities are constructed, contested, and destroyed through social movement activity, and that identity political movements continually produce new identities and new conflicts about inclusion. Within the literature, the gay movement exemplifies these identity-based conflicts with a rich history of boundary contestation over newly intensified identity categories. The emergence of the queer action logic in 1990 forced explicit interrogation of the role of identity in collective action, and provoked social movements literature to wrestle with the same challenge. Joshua Gamson (1995) makes the case that the queer action logic provides an intervention for social movement literature to account for the impulse to dismantle collective identity, claiming that the “queer dilemma” rests in the fact that it is both productive to shore up and to deconstruct identity categories. Due to the internal contradiction implicit in drawing power from identity categories that are the bases for oppression, disrupting or loosening identity categories serving as the foundation of ethnic/essentialist models of sexuality are legitimate targets for queer attack (1995: 389). Queerness “calls for a more developed theory of collective identity formation and its relationship to both institutions and meanings, an understanding that includes the impulse to take apart that identity from within,” argues Gamson, challenging the assumption in social movement theory that stable identity categories fortify a movement. The queer action logic suggests the productive power of dismantling identity categories (1995: 391).
The contradiction of matching an identity-destroying impulse with the creation of “queer” as a collective identity may be generative in and of itself. E.J. Rand cites Michel Foucault to claim, “it is the contradictions that haunt and inhabit the construction of queer identities that produce the most interesting kinds of ‘identity talk’ and that lead to the proliferation of meanings associated with queer” (2004: 297). For Rand, the contradictions within queer identity promote new discourses and thus prevent it from being closed. She argues, “the process of identity negotiation produces an expansion of the possible meanings and referents of queer,” thus multiplying available identities and expanding the meanings associated with queer identity. Rand argues that this legacy of contradictions has outlived Queer Nation, which she claims dissolved due to tensions and conflicts around that very identity proliferation (2004: 303-4). Even in light of Rand’s argument for productive identity proliferation, such production appears to doom the organization that made it possible.
While oppositional identity construction is aggressively engaged in by oppositional queer groups, this type of borderwork is not a one-way street. Rand writes of the radical flank effect created by Queer Nation, that
the constitution of a queer identity as quite distinct from a gay or lesbian identity, then, is a project undertaken not only by queers themselves (who want to delineate their perspectives and goals from those of gay and lesbian assimilationists), but also by the gays and lesbians who want to make sure that they are never mistaken for queers. (2004: 302)
The point to take from Rand is two-fold: the mutuality of the identity construction, shored up both by queers and by gay and lesbian assimilationists, and the benefit derived from oppositional identity construction on the side of mainstream gays.
Proposition
My review of the literature suggests an adjusted understanding of generative or positive effects of social movement activity. While political process theory would define positive effects in accordance with institutional policy change, an analysis responsive to the assertions of culturalists is that there are positive effects of social movement activity that may not relate to, or act against, policy change. Further, social movement scholarship that takes identity construction and deployment as central to understanding collective action shows how internal identity building within social movements and dynamic, oppositional identity building proliferate identities available for social movement participants and may motivate social movement activities by spurring debate and dissention. I suspect that conflict produces enhanced social movement activity. I refer to this as a generative effect, meaning that through engaging in criticism, the boundaries of the social movement are contested, and solidified or broken down. The normative concepts of “productive” are restructured, and the identities available to members of minority groups are increased and further complicated. Thus, while criticism may not contribute to policy change or combat formal anti-gay opposition, it may generate cultural effects such as identity proliferation and internal solidarity. Further, when these mechanisms of oppositional identity deployment are turned outward to other groups, they may change the overall goals of the movement itself.
The political process theory explanation for social movement activity constrained the literature examining social movements to a narrow definition of social movement activity with a focus on policy change. Thus, political process theory contributes to assumptions that preclude consideration of the possible generative effects of infighting and internal dissension. Oppositional queer groups do not fit a model of social movement activity in which challengers who lack institutional access seek policy change by targeting state actors. Instead, oppositional queer groups take among their targets organizations representative of the increasing commercialism and interest group politics in the broader LGBT movement. While oppositional queer groups appear to be part of this movement, their goals are incongruent and frequently at odds with policy goals such as marriage equality and anti-hate crimes legislation. Further, oppositional queer organizations actively interrupt the activities of mainstream groups, as with their hallmark disruptions of the Pride Parade. Thus, to political process theorists who consider social movement activity a challenge to state power, oppositional queer groups appear to be evidence of destructive internal dissension. Critiques of political process theory address cultural goals outside of policy gains and help elaborate on our understanding of oppositional queer movement activity.
This study makes extensive use of the terms “conflict” and “criticism.” In the initial stages of my study I intended this to mean “talking shit,” dissension, conflict, expressions of outrage, and explicit criticisms of other organizations within a movement or individuals within those organizations, both within groups and in public forums. Through conducting interviews, my definition of criticism became more detailed, encompassing acts such as a) personal indictments, b) scandal stories revealing hypocrisy, both explicitly disparaging other organizations or individuals within the movement. These criticisms are connected to additional actions performed by these groups that reflect more traditional conceptions of social movement activity, and c) staging protests in response to another organization’s presence and producing cultural material such as stencils, flyers, and zines to counter the representations produced by mainstream organizations. These forms of generativity are elaborated on in my third chapter, “Talking Trash.” I also explore evidence that would contradict my assertion: stagnation within the movement or organizations due to criticism, evidence that organizations were not forming or were not staging protests due to self-consciousness, or other indicators of criticism as a limiting force.
I problematize the widely held perception, articulated in Barbara Ryan’s (1989) article, that these conflicts are damaging to movement activity, despite the intensification of identity categories and the possibility that factionalism is distressing to individual actors. While the assumption that identity proliferation and conflict are damaging thrives both in social movements literature and in folk understandings within the gay movement, I argue that border skirmishes catalyze organizational formation and protest activity within identity political movements. This assertion fits in with sociological thinking about the function of conflict: conflict helps define group boundaries and shores up identities of those within a group. Internal solidarity is built through boundary maintenance, serving to stabilize groups by reinforcing the common identity of movement insiders. Thus, the gay movement created these identities as salient collectivities and politicized them, providing a cognitive frame that views deviant sexual identity as a basis for oppression, and, for implicitly collective action. Innovations like the tactic of “coming out,” and the practice of shoring up identity categories via systematically rejecting members whose identities were considered threatening (such as bisexuals and transgendered people) or threatened the image of the movement (like BDSM practitioners and butch and femme lesbians) have developed with the identity political logic of the gay movement and inform the dynamics of conflict.
I challenge both received knowledge and folk theories about the destructive power of conflict, which presume that any lack of solidarity is negative, or that energy expended on internal debate is energy better spent addressing formal opposition or promoting “positive” change. Such claims find support in extant literature, though this literature has fallen short of a nuanced approach to cultural and identity outcomes. Political process theory and resource mobilization theory take as a resource a unified identity category, and consider identity fortification and building to be beneficial bonuses of activity addressing the state, insofar as this identity building forms a basis for state-targeted claims. Recalling Ryan (1989), after the fashion of political process theory, “talking trash” in order to reinforce ideological purity is deleterious to movement activity because it factionalizes. I am interested in questioning the assertions that factionalism prevents social movement activity and that “talking trash” destroys social movements. The literature has not provided sufficient answers to these questions. To that end, I look for culturally generative effects: the proliferation of different types of identities available, increased participation in protest activity, and ideological interventions in the broader movement.
Methods and Data
I study oppositional queer criticisms of mainstream LGBT organizations and politics in order to explore the underexamined role of criticism within social movements, particularly identity political movements. I sought interview responses addressing what activists think about conflict and what their intentions are when engaged in conflict. I also observed outcomes produced by criticism and conflict. In order to assess my hypothesis, I define measures of productive results of conflict. Productive implies different observable phenomena depending on the social movement literature one draws on. Outcomes such as tactical innovation and evidence of resisting cooptation are suggested by political process theory. The galvanization of mainstream groups against oppositional groups may build internal solidarity on both sides of a critique, strengthening mainstream commitments to interest group politics while similarly fusing oppositional groups to disruptive insurgence. In light of culturalist critiques, evidence of vitality, ideological and moral consistency with social movement actors, and pleasure taken in protest might also be generative effects. Drawing on literature addressing the role of collective identity, boundary contestation may cause a proliferation of available identities, and strengthen the convictions associated with those identities. In the course of my research, I examined both participants’ explicit understandings of conflict and critique as vital or detrimental, and was attentive to evidence of the mechanisms of oppositional identity construction. At the same time, I sought evidence that would contradict my hypothesis by demonstrating the singularly destructive nature of conflict. Social movements theory alerts us to the dissolution of social movement groups or the decline of a social movement. Culturalist critiques suggest strained friendships and guilt would curtail individual participation. Relating to collective identity, it is possible that conflict could render identities so complex and multiple that it would be hard to anchor social solidarity to them. Thus, while I am not able to formally test competing predictions about the effects of conflict, I do consider negative effects, even though my study is primarily oriented towards exploring the possibility of positive effects. Clearly, both positive and negative effects may co-exist. However, as I have asserted above, the existence of positive effects is under-theorized and studied, and thus I focus my attention on this.
Rationale For Case Selection
The gay movement is ideally suited to explore the role of factionalism, conflict, and oppositional identity construction in social movements. It is considered the quintessential identity movement: exemplary of the pitfalls of identity-based organizing (Bernstein, 1997: 532). Better still, the queer action logic presents a challenge to the premise of identity-based organizing, leveling a critique against the minority model which bases collective identity around shared sexual minority identity and oppression. I identified queer organizations engaged in public disputes with mainstream LGBT groups, and drew interviewees from groups who were critiquing and from those who were critiqued. In-group speech and actions directly addressing other organizations are, respectively, two central modes through which inter-organizational and inter-personal critique occurs. I gather data on these two expressions of criticism through interviews with purposively-selected movement participants.
I interviewed 17 activists in Portland and San Francisco in an effort to determine if infighting and conflict generate social movement activity. My desire to capture the whole phenomenon led me to interview both the criticizers and those whom they criticized. As I found in the course of gathering data, criticism is a dynamic process, and engaging in it opens one and one’s group to intensified critique. By focusing on perceived hypocrisy in mainstream groups, oppositional groups were opening themselves to similar claims. Thus, it was important for me to interview members of oppositional queer groups and also interview members of targeted mainstream LGBT groups. I had the opportunity to examine these dynamics in two US cities: Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California. This allowed me to compare the critical dynamics across two different political contexts.
The Interviews
I conducted 17 in-depth, loosely structured interviews with individuals who were members and former members of groups engaged in public conflict. I designed a loosely structured interview in order to gather responses about conflict among organizations in the LGBT movement. The open form allowed in-depth detail in response to questions asking biographical information, organizational information, and, finally, asking directly about conflict among organizations. This allowed me to both address directly what participants think about conflict, and to get a sense of indirect or unintended outcomes of conflict. Respondents were strongly encouraged to invent a pseudonym in order to preserve their anonymity. However, seven respondents refused and asked that I use their real names. The interview was designed in order to invite participants to engage in critique with me, the interviewer. The interview itself is a speech event of criticism, and as the interviewer I positioned myself to interactively enable, rather than curtail, the “talking shit” of my interviewees. This is an important dimension of methodology: as an interviewer, I expressed shock, made faces, and laughed along with my participants. I did not react in ways that were disingenuous: I did not fake emotional reactions. However, I made the choice as a researcher to not censor my reactions. While this may have biased the interviews, it was necessary in order to structure the event of “talking trash.”
Another factor that contributed to enabling critique is my identity presentation. Participants engaged with me both as a student researcher and as a fellow queer. My deep commitment to radical social change and to queer activism contributed to the quality of my research by equipping me with crucial cultural knowledge, vocabulary, and styles of speech and dress that situated me as an insider with oppositional queer participants. My presentation may have been a hindrance in my interviews with mainstream LGBT participants, as my youth and my interest in conflict may have signaled that my thesis would be critical of older activists and associated centrism in the movement. Overall, I cannot emphasize enough how much this project relied on the contributions of the interview participants, who were willing to talk with me about the sensitive subject of conflict, gave me hours of their time, and invited me into their homes and their workplaces. Oppositional queers responded welcomingly to my gingerly emailed requests to attend their open meetings in spite of increasingly hostile police repression of radical groups, and mainstream LGBT activists set time aside in the middle of their workdays to speak candidly on volatile subjects. Data collection was an immense pleasure thanks to the participants. I recorded the interviews and took detailed notes during interview; later, I transcribed the recordings. The resulting collection of notes constitutes the primary data from which the analysis was developed.
The Cases: Portland and San Francisco
The oppositional queer organizations in my study, QueerRevolution (Portland) and Gay Shame (San Francisco), serve as excellent exemplars of movement activity in the form of criticism leveled at mainstream forms of activism. Both organizations emerged in order to demonstrate against, interrupt, or attempt to block the Pride Parade. Both groups persist in demonstrating against Pride annually. Gay Shame hosts the theatrical Gay Shame Awards and QueerRevolution marches, both objecting to gay consumerism and to the Pride Parade’s corporate sponsorship. The mainstream LGBT organizations, Basic Rights Oregon (Portland), and the LGBT Center (San Francisco), were chosen because they are among those organizations critiqued by Gay Shame and QueerRevolution, and they are exemplary of interest-group approaches to social change: they target policy change and deploy identity for education in order to garner support from a wider voting heterosexual public. Both are well-known in their communities. Basic Rights Oregon is the largest organization of its kind in Oregon, and the LGBT Center in San Francisco is a nexus of numerous organizations. My study spanned from fall of 2005 to spring of 2006. With support from Reed College’s Undergraduate Initiative Research Grant, I traveled to San Francisco, California for two weeks in January 2006 to conduct interviews with members of the oppositional queer group Gay Shame, as well as staff members of the LGBT Community Center. I attended open meetings of both oppositional queer groups in my study; however, the meetings were not the main sources of data. I attended in order to get a first-hand perspective on both groups, but primarily in order to recruit interviewees.
All in all, I interviewed two former members and two current members of QueerRevolution, and two former members and three current members of Gay Shame, for a total of nine oppositional queer activists. Of the mainstream groups, I interviewed two staff members and the Executive Director of San Francisco’s LGBT Community Center, and, in Portland, one staff member and the Executive Director of Basic Rights Oregon, as well as the Executive Director of Love Makes a Family, totaling six activists working with mainstream LGBT organizations. In addition, I interviewed a former member of the Lesbian Avengers who organizes Portland’s Dyke March and collaborated with QueerRevolution in the Funeral for Queer Resistance action at Pride 2005, and historian and former Transgender Nation activist Susan Stryker. These last two participants are not included in my data of “oppositional queer” or “mainstream LGBT” activism because they are not members of groups engaged in these oppositional dynamics. Oppositional participants met with me in coffee shops and their homes, mainstream LGBT activists invited me into their offices for in-depth interviews which ranged from just under an hour to over three hours. Their generosity and patience has furnished this research project with empirical evidence.
Description of Organizations
QueerRevolution: Portland, Oregon
QueerRevolution is a militant, anti-authoritarian, anticapitalist action queer group in Portland, Oregon. In their mission they proclaim, “we strive to develop radical queer culture as we reject the capitalist appropriation of queer culture, creating our own space and movement by learning from past revolutionary struggles.” QueerRevolution, which started in spring of 2002, is in the midst of an organizational transition. It has just become an open collective, whereas in past years new members went through a two-interview screening process. There has been a decline in membership, which organization members chalk up to some important members moving away and to the transitory lifestyles of radical activists. In the past, QueerRevolution organized interventions in Portland’s Pride celebration, tabled at events, typed up safer-space policies, and altered billboards and public spaces with queer messages using stickers and spray paint. At present, QueerRevolution hosts movie showings and discussions, advertising these events on Indymedia, a radical news website, and their list-serve. I attended a few monthly meetings in which two or three members of QueerRevolution got together and talked about the directions they would like to see QueerRevolution take.
Gay Shame: San Francisco, California
Gay Shame, like QueerRevolution, is a militant, anti-assimilationist queer group with a tactical focus on direct action. Gay Shame San Francisco has been around for a little bit longer than QueerRevolution. They have weekly open meetings at a radical bookstore in the Mission in San Francisco and have non-hierarchical organizational structure, using a consensus process in order to make decisions. The actions that Gay Shame puts on have changed over time: initially, they threw a celebration as an alternative to Pride, then brought an action into the Castro in order to explicitly criticize consumerism and assimilationism in mainstream LGBT culture. When I attended Gay Shame meetings, they had most recently been objecting to a conference on LGBT activism called “Creating Change,” hosted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and were starting projects against gentrification in Berkeley and the Tenderloin. Gay Shame had previously concentrated energy on criticizing the Castro culture and LGBT activism, but has branched out to work with the Coalition on Homelessness around anti-homeless political candidates and propositions. The Gay Shame meetings I attended focused primarily on strategizing around resisting gentrification both in the Tenderloin, a historically impoverished neighborhood being targeted for beautification and improvement by the Lower Polk Neighbors Association, and in Berkeley, where a historically black gay bar had lost its liquor license due to complaints from new businesses in the increasingly gentrified area.
Features of Oppositional Queer Organizations
The oppositional queer organizations I studied oppose racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, ablest, and ageist oppression through the lens of a queer political action logic. The multi-issue politic they advance advocates directing movement resources to protecting the most vulnerable populations: invoked as queer kids, queer people of color, sex workers, and transgendered people. Combatting capitalism and imperialism, considered to be the root of oppressions, involves both internal and external assault on oppressive practices, including personal consumption. Direct action is not focused exclusively on formal opposition, like the Christian Right or the federal government, but exerts energy criticizing in-movement “others,” mainstream LGBT organizations. In my study, I concentrate on the criticisms leveled against mainstream LGBT culture and organizations, particularly on internal trash talk and externally directed “shaming” through protest demonstrations and wheat-pasted fliers, zines, stickers, and spray-painted stencils.
Both Gay Shame and QueerRevolution emerged to target the Pride Parade. On a national level, Pride has become increasingly commercialized, reliant on major corporate sponsorship, and is organized by mainstream LGBT Pride committees. Oppositional queer groups protest Pride as a representation of assimilationism and corruption in the gay movement. QueerRevolution staged a “Funeral For Queer Resistance” which interrupted and joined the route of the Pride Parade in Portland, Oregon in June 2005. A companion flyer distributed at the funerary march mourned the death of AIDS activism, queer war resistors, and the sex liberation movement, indicting the Human Rights Campaign for selling out to corporate sponsorship. Gay Shame hosts the annual Gay Shame Awards, a street-theatrical awards ceremony where participants “commend” the most hypocritical gays. These demonstrations employ explicit and adversarial tactics. Gay Shame, for example, uses effigies (replicas of people burned in order to make a statement against that person) at protests. In addition to criticizing mainstream LGBT organizations and individuals, both groups criticize non-LGBT organizations like the Lower Polk Neighbors, and politicians like San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom. Also, both groups actively organize around issues not generally associated with LGBT politics. For example, QueerRevolution staged a solidarity action against the Tualatin Valley Skins, going from door to door in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood where the neo-Nazi group planned a demonstration and asked if residents wanted someone to sit on their porch (interviews; F. O’Clock, M. Armstrong). Oppositional queer organizations are hostile to formal political engagement, and use loose consensus-based process in order to avoid hierarchy within the group. Like the women’s liberation movement, oppositional queer organizations are prefiguritive, attempting to model desirable society (an egalitarian one in which everyone participates) in their organizational form.
Basic Rights Oregon and Love Makes a Family: Portland, Oregon
Basic Rights Oregon is a conglomerate whose mission is to end discrimination against LGBT people in Oregon. Basic Rights Oregon is the largest LGBT organization in the state; it offers leadership in ballot campaigns and in lobbying the legislature for equal rights for sexual and gender minority people. The political organization is Basic Rights Oregon, their charitable nonprofit is called The Basic Rights Education Fund, and they have two Political Action Committees: a Ballot Measure Political Action Committee and a Candidate Political Action Committee. They are approaching their ten-year anniversary. Basic Rights Oregon was born in opposition to anti-gay ballot measures pushed by the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance, an anti-gay Christian Right group. Basic Rights Oregon was the product of a consolidation of a number of LGBT organizations, all competing for the same donor base. The transition was not a smooth one, and fallout from that confluence still survives ten years later with activists involved in past organizations and with donors.
Basic Rights Oregon’s work is reliant to some extent on the cycles of ballot initiatives and defensive response to anti-gay legislation. Their focus is on education; they do phone polling and door to door canvassing to try to educate voters about equal rights, as well as trying to educate legislators and embolden supportive legislators to support LGBT causes. Basic Rights Oregon receives support from a number of sources including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign. Coalition work is critical to them; they work with a number of organizations such as the Rural Organizing Project, Planned Parenthood, Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos Del Noroeste, and others. Importantly, Basic Rights Oregon was the primary organization fighting against Measure 36, a constitutional amendment excluding same sex marriage in Oregon, which passed in 2005.
Basic Rights Oregon’s most visible conflict is not with an oppositional queer organization but with another mainstream LGBT organization, Love Makes a Family. Love Makes a Family was founded in 1992 to address marriage equality and to address LGBT issues in schools. Bonnie Tinker, the creator and Executive Director, has been at the center of an alternative newspaper controversy after she published her critical analysis of Basic Rights Oregon’s loss of the “No on 36” campaign which sought to prevent anti-gay Measure 36 from rendering equal marriage unconstitutional in Oregon. Tinker is vocally critical of Basic Rights Oregon’s strategies, particularly their failure to build coalitions with other organizations; and additionally, Love Makes a Family competes with Basic Rights Oregon for donor support.
The LGBT Center: San Francisco, California
The LGBT Center is a large community center that houses a number of different organizations in San Francisco, as well as running five of its own programs. They have a building program where they rent space out and house events, helping a number of organizations by providing relatively affordable offices. The LGBT Center is not a political or legal organization, and it identifies its position as a community center: a place where people convene around LGBT issues. The LGBT Center runs an economic development program that brings job fairs, helps LGBT people get business loans, and helps queer youth with financial literacy. Through the Health and Wellness Program, the Center provides childcare and support for parents. The café housed within the building hosts queer open mic nights, they have film screenings, and the Center also houses a drop-in for youth under 23. The “Cyber Center” offers visitors an hour of free Internet use a day. Programs such as SNAP! are established with grants toward HIV/AIDS prevention, and free condoms and lubricant fill plastic jars around the front desk. The Center is a nexus of different organizations and provides informal referral to the hundreds of programs for LGBT people in San Francisco. With a staff of twenty, the Center runs between three and four hundred events for nine thousand visitors a month. The Center provides most events for free in an effort to reach as many people as possible.
Features of Mainstream LGBT Organizations
The mainstream LGBT organizations in my study strive for policy change using institutional means. They believe that movement resources should be directed to establishing minority rights for sexual and gender minority people, focusing on issues like equal marriage, anti-discrimination and hate crimes legislation. Mainstream LGBT organizations are bureaucratically organized non-profits, with formal meetings and hierarchically organized decisionmaking. They host fundraisers and rely on donations in order to pay staff, lobby, develop voter education materials, and maintain office spaces. They also rely heavily on volunteers in order to run programs and campaigns. Tactics include phone banking, canvassing door-to-door, lobbying, applying for grants, and organizing fundraising events. Mainstream LGBT organizations tend to deploy identity for education, emphasizing likeness with the straight majority and issues related to family and business development. Mainstream LGBT organizations participate in Pride marches and take them to be one component of fortifying community solidarity, which benefits interest group goals.
I chose the mainstream LGBT organizations based on recent public clashes with oppositional queer organizations, completing sets of QueerRevolution—Basic Rights Oregon and Gay Shame—LGBT Center. In the aftermath of the Funeral For Queer Resistance action at Pride in Portland, Oregon, I witnessed members of QueerRevolution booing the demonstration of a group of Pride marchers, whom I then presumed to be Basic Rights Oregon. I later learned, through my interviews, that the Pride members had been representatives of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Basic Rights Oregon is the largest LGBT organization in Portland, and they get financial support from HRC, which does not have an office in Portland. Gay Shame targeted the LGBT Center when they hosted a fundraiser for then-Mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom. Gay Shame protested, passing out flyers and hot pink bags of trash in dissent. Police brutalized the demonstrators and four were arrested, prompting more demonstration against the LGBT Center and the police charges.
Two Different Movements?
When evaluating productivity based on a proliferation of organizations, an analyst must be cautious that splintering may be read as a burgeoning movement. There is a risk, as mentioned in my critique of Elizabeth Armstrong’s analysis, that, by counting increased numbers of organizations, one is not counting the success of a particular movement frame. Instead, one risks including organizations that are separating from a movement, counting among successes organizations arising in response to the shortcomings of the frame. Thus my study is vulnerable to accepting the terms of the mainstream LGBT impulse to umbrella dissent and claim protesting actors and organizations as part of the overall diversity of the movement, as exemplified (to the frustration of QueerRevolution members) by the gay newspaper Just Out’s portrayal of them as “anti-pride protestors” one week and then incorporating them in the photomontage of Pride the following week (interview M. Armstrong; T. Fruit). While mainstream LGBT activists never questioned the inclusion of oppositional queers, some oppositional queers identify themselves as “oppositional to the GLBT movement,” or described two different movements (interviews; F. O’Clock, M. Armstrong). Further, members of both Gay Shame and QueerRevolution related their organizations not to LGBT or queer organizations, but instead to anarchist and anti-capitalist groups. QueerRevolution member Tomato Fruit summed this up quite succinctly, saying, “I see my place as—a queer group in the anti-capitalist movement instead of an anti-capitalist group in the queer movement.” This, along with characterizations of some organizations as part of a “marriage movement,” strongly suggest that the analytical categories that I brought as a researcher may have encouraged oppositional respondents to relate or distinguish their organizations and LGBT organizations; some have presented themselves in an organizational field with other anarchist and anti-capitalist groups. The same caution applies to mainstream organization Basic Rights Oregon: Roey Thorpe, the Executive Director, talked about seeing Basic Rights Oregon as a progressive social change organization devoted to LGBT issues, and said that, in that way, they had less in common with other LGBT organizations in Oregon, comparing Basic Rights Oregon instead with NARAL Pro-Choice America and the ACLU. She cited as further evidence of this the fact that half of the staff have opposite sex partners, and that over half of their supporters identify as straight.
This ambiguity went unresolved and problematizes my claim that this conflict is internecine. Importantly, queer activists do not see their efforts as part of the same movement as groups defined as more mainstream LGBT. Participants saw oppositional queer activism as part of an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, and anarchist movement; a broader leftist movement to fight all oppression. Why not argue that oppositional queer groups and mainstream LGBT groups are part of different social movements? By taking the gay movement and consumerist gay institutions as their targets, oppositional queer groups develop tactics or “repertoires of contention” that are particular to the non-state institutions they criticize (Armstrong and Bernstein, 2004: 13). When listing the implications of understanding non-state institutions as targets of social movement activity, Armstrong and Bernstein ask: must one be an insider or an outsider to target a particular institution, what are the qualifications? (2004: 14) In order to participate in a queer critique of the mainstream LGBT movement, one must be queer, must be an insider. While oppositional queer respondents did not see themselves as part of the same movement — many were opposed to LGBT and marriage movement activity — it is necessary for them to have claims as beneficiaries of that movement activity in order to critique it.
Before evaluating my contentions using empirical evidence garnered from these interviews, the groups in my study should be historically contextualized. Oppositional queer groups like Gay Shame and QueerRevolution are distinct from other queer direct action groups like Queer Nation, with which they share many tactics and aesthetics, because they emerged as critiques of dominant social movement tactics and goals in an era of newly powerful interest group LGBT organizations and new striking commercialism in the gay movement. In order to illustrate the unique position of oppositional queer groups in contrast to mainstream LGBT activism, I will provide a brief history contextualizing the current gay movement in a legacy of AIDS activism, identity-based challenges to exclusion within the gay movement, and the emergence of a queer action logic. I argue that organizations such as Gay Shame and QueerRevolution represent a novel type of reflexive social movement activity that takes as its target LGBT activism and mainstream LGBT culture, using critique in an attempt to catalyze a transformative challenge to all forms of oppression.
Chapter Two: The Queer Intervention
The Rise of the Queer Movement: Debates and Analyses
In order to understand oppositional queer organizations, we must take into account the historical context of the queer intervention into gay politics, dated to the 1990 emergence of direct action group Queer Nation. I sketch a history of the emergence of the queer action logic, and in doing so, critically revisit Elizabeth Armstrong’s history of the gay movement. I describe the particularities of the queer intervention into gay identity politics: the impulse to destroy identity categories, the movement’s relationship to physical violence, and the political strategies of camp and shaming. Considering tactics like “shaming” in light of the history of queer direct action provides the necessary groundwork for analyzing trash talking among queer activists:
The emergence of queer identities, sensibilities, and politics was not just the latest fad in the lesbian and gay community. It represented an ideological and generational shift as profound as the transition from a homophile mentality to gay liberation. It has been partly a youthful reinvention of established ways of differing from heterosexual norms, perpetuating lesbian and gay culture through its transformation. But it also represents a significant departure—an anti-identity rather than an identity (Stryker and Van Buskirk, 1996: 118).
In the early 1990s, lesbian and gay politics encountered a combative new political action logic. A queer action logic critiques the concept of stable gay identity upon which the gay movement premises claims to minority rights. The queer critique is influenced by the writings of people of color who argue that identities such as race and class are subsumed underneath sexuality within the gay movement. Queer politics draws on battles over multiculturalism, marginalization of lesbian identity, stigmatization of leather and BDSM practices, and the exclusion of transgendered people in the gay movement (Cruikshank,1992; Vaid, 1995; Wilton, 1998; Califia, 2002; Stryker and Van Buskirk, 1998). Queerness is understood to accommodate multiple identities in contrast to a gay politic that fails to accommodate these complexities: a backlash against gay movement gains (Gamson, 1995: 591-2). Stryker and Van Buskirk echo this assertion, claiming it became safer to define oneself in terms of negatives (1996: 118). This negatively defined identity category was queer: queer meant not fitting in with mainstream gender or sexuality, nor fitting in with the options of the gay movement. Joshua Gamson identifies this practice as the embrace of perversity, opposing society itself, and questioning normality in heterosexual and homosexual contexts, writing:
Queerness in its most distinctive forms shakes the ground on which gay and lesbian politics has been built, taking apart the ideas of “sexual minority” and a “gay community,” indeed of “gay” and “lesbian” and even “man” and “woman”. It builds on central difficulties of identity-based organizing: the instability of identities both individual and collective, their made-up yet necessary character. It exaggerates and explodes these troubles, haphazardly attempting to build a politics from the rubble of deconstructed collective categories. (Gamson, 1995: 390)
Gamson characterizes this as a self-destructive impulse, evoking the image of pulling the rug out from under ones’ own feet, and his article provides an excellent starting point for the analysis of groups seemingly bent on dismantling their own movements. Gamson argues that the tension between the utility and destructiveness of identity categories, though present in all identity movements, is forced into the limelight by the queer action logic that takes the destabilization of collective identity as a goal and accomplishment of collective action. Gamson argues that the ethnic/essentialist politic of identity movements and, specifically, of the gay movement, demand clear group boundaries, and that the queer movement presents a disruptive and even threatening deconstructionist political logic that identifies binary identity categories like “gay” and “straight” as the origin of oppression. Gamson suggests that queer politics and deconstructive strategies fail to address the “very concrete and violent institutional forms to which the most logical answer is resistance in and through a particular identity” by attacking identity itself as “the fulcrum of domination” (1995: 597). This logic conceptualizes ethnic and minority categories as at once the basis for repression and a ready-made frame within which to organize. He argues that border-patrolling anti-queer arguments contain a pragmatic concern that unclear membership criteria jeopardize possible political gains for sexual minority people.
Accounts of the impact of the queer movement vary. I contradict Elizabeth Armstrong’s contention that the queer logic’s challenge was incorporated into the political logic of “unity through disunity.” Recalling my assertion that Armstrong does not fully account for movement activity generated by conflict, I contend that the queer action logic’s effect is obscured by Armstrong’s analytical categories that absorb queer and autonomous challenges under overall movement activity, using these organizations in her measure of LGBT movement strength. Armstrong attributes what she considers the short lifespan and low impact of the queer movement to the internal ambivalence of its frame, its failure to produce a viable alternative premise for organizing, the political climate, and the gay movement’s cooptation response. While many scholars equate the movement’s lifespan with that of Queer Nation, Gamson’s characterization of the queer movement as a combination of decentralized groups and an academic movement is more accurate. The spectrum of genders and sexuality that queerness deemed appropriately grouped by its deconstructive action logic reverberated through the gay movement from the clothes people wore to the identity categories “queer” opened up (see Stein, 1992; Gamson, 1995; Stryker and Van Buskirk, 1998). The enormous cultural productivity of the queer and trans movements survived Queer Nation well beyond its collapse: queer studies is the one of the fastest growing disciplines in the nation, since 1992. Nonetheless, Armstrong minimizes this impact, writing, “the ambivalence of queer politics resolved in favor of identity politics. The boundaries of the gay movement were extended and status hierarchies restructured” (2002: 183). Arguing that this further fortified the gay movement, she writes:
By incorporating bisexuals and transgenders, the gay identity movement acknowledged the ambiguity, contradiction, and complexity of sexual categorization. Allowing for this ambiguity helped forestall a more fundamental challenge to the logic of identity politics. Thus, queer politics helped solidify gay identity politics instead of undermining it. Stryker and Van Buskirk’s view that queer politics “represented an ideological and generational shift as profound as the transition from homophile mentality to gay liberation” overstated the case (2002: 184).
Armstrong casts queerness as a failed sub-identity movement, conceding that queer politics succeeded in institutionalizing the inclusion of bisexual, queer, and transgendered people and claiming that, through this inclusion, queer politics were adopted and neutralized by the broader gay movement. She takes as evidence of “the domestication of queer politics” the early 1990s’ incorporation of “queer” into gay identity organization names (2002: 183). In her analysis, conflict is implicitly detrimental: the success of the field is measured as its absorption of challengers.
While Armstrong argues that the queer movement was co-opted, she asserts that critical interventions challenging the dominant logic of the gay movement are vital with present interest group dominance and commercialization of the gay movement (2002: 190). In her assessment of the current state of the movement, Armstrong notes that interest group organizations have become so powerful that they are no longer accountable to members as they were in the past. Armstrong connects this change in the behavior of interest group organizations to increasing commercialization (2002: 188). Thus, Armstrong’s position in relationship to contentious politics within the gay movement is ambiguous: while she presents criticism as a potential threat to movement survival, her assessment of the current state of the movement implies that contentious politics may be all that prevents the gay movement from domination by powerful interest group politics, which increasingly constrict the diversity attended to while claiming to serve a broad constituency. These progressive challenges to interest group power in the gay movement are articulated by organizations I describe as oppositional queer organizations. While the word “oppositional” is intended to distinguish them from the broader queer movement of the 1990s, this is only to express that they represent a particular deployment of a queer action logic explicitly oppositional to the broader LGBT movement.
Oppositional Queer Organizations: Particular Features
The tactics, strategic use of identity, multi-issue politics, and organizational forms of oppositional queer organizations most immediately resemble those of the radical AIDS action group ACT UP and Queer Nation. However, oppositional queer groups are distinct from ACT UP and Queer Nation while actively referring to their strategies and semiotics. With further investigation we can see that oppositional queer groups are highly influenced by the women’s movement, lesbian feminist community-building, sex radical opposition to lesbian feminism, the work of feminists of color critiquing racism in the women’s movement, Black Power, and the transgender liberation movement. Outside of the scope of identity-based action, oppositional queer groups draw on anarchist and anti-consumerist activism, and on the critique of identity politics springing up among progressives in the 1990s. This pastiche of radical influences culminates in a devotion to challenging all forms of institutional oppression, summed up in the now familiar list of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ablism. The valorization of in-your-face provocative actions, the preference for direct action that takes the streets and nostalgically evokes rioting , and the use of agi
