Homosexuality is not an ever-fixéd mark; it’s a contingent identity, something developed through a slow accrual of meaning over the centuries. Within it are still the remnants of sin, its half-life still slowly poisoning gays millennia on, and sickness, and crime. There are remnants of a heritage of rebellion, of throwing established norms into anarchy, but also of order, of the relentless policing of the self, and of the behaviour of other queers.
The history of homosexuality is a long history of failure – failure to understand ourselves, failure to understand how we relate to society, and the failures of racism and exclusion. It is also a history of dead ends; of movements like the Uranians or the masculinists, trying to find new ways to express same-sex desire. It is not just an issue of shifting language, from ‘sodomite’ to ‘urning’, from ‘invert’ to ‘queer’: the changing words emerge out of a recognition that what it means to be gay has shifted, and new words are needed to understand it.
Just as it has always changed, it will keep changing, too. If the conflicts within queer cultures sometimes seem to be split along largely intergenerational lines, that is because old understandings of what constitutes the identity are brushing up against new ones.
It might seem counterintuitive, given the title of the book, but we want to be clear that we profile these characters from history not because we want to condemn them – or, at least, not totally. A principle of understanding our status as gay people both within our culture and within wider society is this: we are not just the protagonists, but also the products of history. Not only do our rights come from prior political struggles that were full of faults and fault lines, but everything about what we conceive of gay to mean is also the product of centuries of accretions of meanings, roles, and experiences.
What are the implications of trying to build a sense of political solidarity upon these shifting sands? Well, perhaps it’s that the shifting sands make solidarity vital: it’s the only thing that has ever worked for queer people. If our history of homosexuality has any consistent lesson, it’s that the ability to live as queer people faces challenges that are always fluctuating. Certain narratives within liberal gay circles like to paint the gay rights enjoyed in some Western countries not just as the inevitable product of the Western nation-state, a slow forward march towards rights and justice, but also as permanent, intractable, the end-point of progress. But the history of bad gays complicates that; our history is full of failed attempts at liberation, at new boundaries rolled back in public book burnings, of the ever-present threat of state suppression and social stigma. The value of your liberation may go down as well as up.
Where some might see the wide-ranging acceptance that some forms of homosexuality now enjoy in some places as a result of increased liberalism bringing more people into the social contract of the state, we see, instead, the fruits of hundreds of political, social, and cultural movements making homosexuality visible; making alliances with other political and social identities; and broadening contact between political struggles. As Roderick Ferguson argues in One-Dimensional Queer, it was in these alliances that the parts of gay liberation worth saving originated, and it is to these alliances that any queer politics worth its salt must now turn.1
It is only through solidarity and alliance that liberation is possible; it is also as part of the same process that we can build towards a better form of being, realising in ourselves new facets of being together, new ways to inhabit what Michel Foucault called the ‘slantwise’, the ‘diagonal lines’ cut through the social fabric.2 For alongside our history of homosexuality, drawn from the malignant homos of our culture, run brilliant counter-histories, experiences of alliance and solidarity that offer us alternative futures, should we wish to dream them forward.
The labour union representing marine cooks and stewards in 1930s California slowly radicalized under pressure from members upset with racism in the union’s ranks and its limp resistance to management. Eventually, they formed a Communist, explicitly anti-racist, explicitly pro-queer union. ‘No red-baiting, no race-baiting, no queen-baiting’ became their slogan, and they stood in solidarity with other radical unions in waves of general strikes across the State of California that transformed labour relations. One member of that union went on to help co-found the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States, and which had, at least at the beginning, a radical, Communist, anti-racist analysis of the contradictions producing homosexuality. You can learn more about this in Allan Bérubé’s essays on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, brilliant pieces of queer history and labour history full of lessons, tools, and paths forward.3
On a June night in 1969, a multiracial group of working-class street kids, drag queens, trans women, sex workers, and sissies, not at all the kinds of people History remembers as its typical heroic subjects, got pissed off and resisted arrest and took to the streets and rioted. Three days of street riots ensued. A few years before, similar riots had taken place at the Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco; but these riots outside the Stonewall Inn in the West Village marked a sea change in the self-confidence and exterior politicization of queer movements. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two crucial participants at Stonewall, trans women of colour who engaged in sex work, created an organization called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, or STAR, demanding that Gay Power include fighting back against police and fighting for gay men and trans women in prisons. They pooled their earnings to create a safe house for street kids, queens, and trans women to live in.4 Throughout the 1970s, prison outreach and liberation continued to play a major role in radical gay and lesbian organizing.
In the 1970s, gay liberation evolved along the explicit model of alliance with anti-colonial and Third Worldist liberation groups. Immediately, there were fault lines: Third World Gay Revolution, in New York City, split off from the local main gay liberation group and developed analyses of racism and colonization and how those processes intersected with the development of sexuality as we understand it today. They protested single-issue politics and racism among white gay and lesbian movements.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, gay liberation continued to exist in meaningful, if complex, alliance with anti-colonial struggles in the imperial core. (Emily Hobson’s excellent book Lavender and Red covers this well.) A group of Black socialist lesbian feminists, the Combahee River Collective, developed a theory of the relationship between politics and their sexuality, insisting that if they were not free, then no one would be. Audre Lorde brought this theory to Berlin, where a group of Black German women created an anti-racist, lesbian-feminist movement.5
With the advent of the 1980s came a new wave of right-wing politics, a backlash to the multiple revolutions of the long 1960s. Brutal austerity was accompanied by attacks on democracy and collective political, cultural, and social expression – first in the neocolonial laboratories of neoliberalism in South America, and then by Reagan in the United States and Thatcher in Great Britain. In Britain, during the miners’ strike of 1984–85, a group of gays and lesbians in London created an activist group, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, to support the striking miners as they attempted to take Thatcher on, backing the miners’ efforts to secure a dignified livelihood for themselves and their communities. When Thatcher, in a shocking attack on democracy, stole control of the union’s bank accounts, LGSM held benefits (such as the infamous Pits and Perverts concert, featuring Bronski Beat) to raise funds. In return, the miners opposed Thatcher’s Section 28, a brutal attack on queer children and on freedom of speech in public education that effectively forbade any discussion of sexuality in the school system.
This is where the Right wants to take us back to, and there are certain elements of the Left that are astonishingly eager to blame neoliberalism on the vicissitudes of queer French philosophers rather than the crisis of profits of the 1970s and capital’s need to generate a backlash against the ghosts of liberation.
When AIDS ravaged queer communities, we organized, creating direct service organizations to help people survive and be cared for in sickness, and direct action organizations to fight the murderous, ignorant indifference shown by state officials; fighting to change official definitions of AIDS to include women in drug trials and social services; fighting for universal health care and free pharmaceutical care; fighting for drug users and people living on the street; fighting for patents to be lifted on life-saving medication so that people in the Global South could survive. In the aftermath of AIDS, as movements in Britain and the United States began to be more and more dominated by a class of people who had never before been so involved in gay and lesbian organizing but who sought to throw away multiple-issue concerns in favour of securing relationship recognition and military service rights for gay and lesbian people, they were challenged by groups like Queers for Racial and Economic Justice.
It is not always so easy, especially when subjects are marked by whiteness and other forms of power and privilege, to neatly separate the good from the bad, the right from the wrong. The answer, though, is not to simply stan our heroes and shush up about their flaws and faults; rather, it’s to understand how people have made and been made by history, how and why they have failed, and how and why we might succeed.
In 1977, the mostly good gay Larry Mitchell, from his compound in upstate New York, wrote a fable called The Faggots and Their Friends between Revolutions. ‘The faggots and their friends’, he wrote, ‘live the best while empires are falling. Since the men are always building as many empires as they can, there are always one or two falling and so one or two places for the faggots and their friends to go.’6 He dreamed that faggots were a kind of being other than men, that we inhabited communities of exquisitely liberated homosexuality in which we cultivated the states of beauty and harmony and peace that men do not know about. But near the fable’s end, he perceived that this, too, served the system: ‘The faggots and their friends and the women who love women’, he wrote, ‘can keep the men off balance for a long time by subtly, but continually, changing their identities. The men who are in charge of controlling it all find it difficult always to know how many of each kind there are and who they are … They can play with the men’s categories to try to neutralize the men’s guns. Yet this will not make them free. They begin to know, from the inside, that they cannot be free until this dance is stopped … When the faggots and their friends cease being the faggots and their friends, the deathly dance of the men will begin to wane and a new dance will begin to emerge. Then the third revolutions will engulf us all.’7
We do not get to choose who we are but we do get to choose how, and with whom, we dance: what queerness, what faggotry, what transness, what gender trouble and abolition will be for us and with us and to us. The past is still with us; the revolutions of the queer future beckon.
Acknowledgements
When we began producing our podcast we thought we were making it for a tiny audience, one made up of mostly our friends. The fact we have been able to reach a much wider audience than that is down entirely to our listeners, and we are enormously grateful to all those who have listened to, shared, and recommended the podcast, and especially those who have supported us through Patreon and sent us their own suggestions for future bad gays, without whom the show and this book would have been impossible. Thank you.
We would like to thank our editor Leo Hollis for his guiding hand in shaping the book, and to Huw’s agent, Niki Chang, and Ben’s agent, Doug Young, for their help in realising the project from an idea over coffee to the book in your hand. It takes many hands to produce a book, and we’re grateful for all those at Verso whose hard work is involved, especially Jennifer Tighe, Maya Osborne, Michelle Betters, Catherine Smiles, Rowan Wilson, Federico Campagna, Brian Baughan, Jordan Taylor-Jones, Mark Martin, and Bob Bhamra.
Many thanks too to our guests over the years, for the insight and energy they have brought to the show: Sholem Krishtalka, Juliet Jacques, the late and much-missed Decorsey Macauleney (‘Mac’) Folkes, Edna Bonhomme, Jana Funke, Richard Power Sayeed, Diarmuid Hester, David Eichert, Max Fox, and Ari Níelsson.
For the researchers, writers, theorists, thinkers, and activists on whose work this book and its arguments are based, we have nothing but awe and respect; we hope that our citations have been generous enough to drive more people to engage more deeply with the rich variety of material available on queer pasts and queer futures.
Thanks to our friends, colleagues, and comrades who are always sharing, discussing, and expanding ideas on sex, identity, gender, and history, and have been such a rich source of knowledge over the years. Thanks are in order to those people, in no particular order: Davey Davis, Sz Huldt, Robin Craig, Joan Escofet, Joan Morera, Jay Owens, James Butler, Jesse Darling, Angelica Sgouros, Felix del Campo, Jack Young, Isabel Waidner, Shon Faye, Mathew Parkin, Claudia Pagès, Jasper Murphy, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Ray Filar, Andrew D. J. Shield, Sarah Shin, Seán McGovern, McKenzie Wark, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Samuel Delany, Jay Springett, Ben Vickers, Fer Boyd, Madeleine Stack, Connor Friesen, Onyeka Igwe, Pete Mills, Nina Wake-ford, Richard John Jones, Tamar Shlaim, Michael Harding, Liz Rosenfeld, Connor Spencer, Sawyer Huff, Syd Ramirez, Harry Stopes, AA Bronson and Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur, Dr Isabel Valli, Arash Fayez, Jim Richards, Danilo Rosato, Giovanni Turco and Giacomo Garavelloni, Peter Welz, Ronny Matthes, Khary Polk, Nicholas Courtman, Angela Zimmerman, Ashkan Sepahvand, Birgit Bosold and Heiner Schulze (and the entire team at Berlin’s Schwules Museum), Colin Self, Juliana Gleeson, Gabe Rosenberg and Harris Solomon, Sébastien Tremblay, all twelve brilliant Doctoral Fellows of 2020 at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Free University of Berlin, Barrie Kosky, Kate Davison, Rosa Lee, Michelle Esther O’Brien, Anna Hájková, Jennifer Evans, and Elijah Burgher and Jonathan Carreon. Thanks to the people we surely and shamefully forgot. Thanks also to our teachers, including Sherry Edwards, Sebastian Conrad, Marcelle Clements, Margrit Pernau, Linda Gordon, K Kevyne Baar, Martin Lücke, Greg Drake, and the late and dearly missed Ty Vignone. Finally, acknowledgements are due to the wider queer community that has nurtured us both for most of our lives, offering hope and consolation and bottles of poppers on the dancefloor, chatted with us on Twitter and in chatrooms and darkrooms, people who have held our hands and lived by example. We just love the faggots, and their (our) friends.
Last but certainly not least: thanks to our families and our partners, João and Cory John, for their care, love, and tolerance.