Eyes on the prize
Have you ever been bullied, fired, harassed, beaten up or threatened with violence because you are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender? Has someone ever tried to “cure” you of your homosexuality? Have you ever hesitated to kiss your lover in public for fear of violent reprisals?
Young gays and lesbians may have less experience with these virulent forms of homophobia, but they were the norm in the United States for most of the 20th century. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in June to affirm marriage equality, there has been great rejoicing in the gay community, and a sense of triumph over the forces of bigotry. But few accounts of the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision acknowledge that decades of LGBT activism led to this transformational ruling. Many queers and most heterosexuals are woefully ignorant about LGBT history, which is not generally taught in secondary schools and has only recently entered university curricula.
Here in California, things are starting to change as schools implement the Fair Education Act, a 2011 measure that mandates inclusion of LGBT history in public education (along with the histories of ethnic and racial groups and people with disabilities).
Still, many school districts are not exactly on top of this task: It may be some time before most California schoolchildren learn about Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (founders of the Daughters of Bilitis) with the same gravitas given to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. In the meantime, their teachers might do well to consult Lillian Faderman’s “The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle,” an encyclopedic history of the modern movement for LGBT rights from the late 1940s to the present.
The author of “Surpassing the Love of Men” and “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” — both classics of lesbian history — Faderman draws on extensive interviews, existing scholarship, primary research and a lifetime of pioneering work on LGBT history. She is a tireless researcher but sometimes suffers from a forest-forthe-trees problem. “The Gay Revolution” is excessively detailed, which makes it challenging to read; the best strategy might be to dip in and out, skipping around for the choice bits, rather than reading its 794 pages straight through.
The book appears a few years after Michael Bronski’s “A Queer History of the United States,” following in the tradition of Jonathan Ned Katz’s groundbreaking “Gay American History” (1976), as well as works by John D’Emilio, Estelle Freedman and others, though most of these books focus on social history, not activism.
Given that the shelves groan with all this prior scholarship, I am not completely convinced that this ginormous tome deepens our understanding of the movements for LGBT equality, though it does collect everything in one place.
Faderman’s story is like the old introduction from ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”: “the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat.” She works hard to cast a wide net, both geographically and gender-wise, which is difficult, given that many of the greatest struggles and victories took place on the two coasts, and the majority of the key figures were highly educated middle- or upperclass gay white men. Gay activism changed with the times and the issues: There are a lot of stories, countless protagonists and staggering amounts of information, making the book feel like a 12-hour opera with 800 characters.
Faderman shines in certain narratives, such as the story of Frank Kameny, a Harvard Ph.D. who became a gay activist in 1957 after being fired from his civil service job, solely for being homosexual. He never prevailed in his 1961 lawsuit against the U.S. Civil Service Commission, but became an important activist in Washington, D.C., bravely staging public protests against government homophobia and discriminatory hiring practices as early as 1965. Though brilliant, Kameny was also challenging, even annoying, and much more conservative than those who followed.
Ever the bluestocking historian, Faderman adopts a bemused tone, remaining slightly distant from the antics of the radical activists of the 1960s through the 1980s: She wants us to know that she is deadly serious about this history, no matter how theatrical or irreverent the protests became.
One of the more interesting sections chronicles efforts by the radical Gay Activist Alliance to combat the degrading antigay biases of the psychiatric and medical professions. It took years of dramatic and disruptive protests before the then-conservative American Psychiatric Association finally ended its pathologizing characterization of homosexuality as a form of mental illness in late 1973. This was in spite of psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker’s groundbreaking research of the mid-1950s, which proved that lesbians and gay men were not psychologically distinguishable from the rest of the population.
Faderman has a tendency to dive deeply into internecine battles, including power struggles for leadership of LGBT organizations and conflicting strategies for confronting enemies ranging from government officials to God-and-country zealots. One imagines, however, that only eager-beaver graduate students are going to savor the minute details of such relatively obscure events as the fight for the lesbian rights plank at the 1977 National Women’s Conference.
I did stumble onto one statement that made my hair stand on end. The book describes the seminal 1963 civil rights protest as “Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” but fails to mention that the march, now remembered principally for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, was actually the brainchild of labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Faderman does credit his colleague, gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, for organizing the event, but only in parentheses. Shame!
Her description of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 raises other questions. Details of this watershed moment have long been contested, though Faderman does not acknowledge her chief difficulty: Practically every gay resident of New York over age 65 now claims to have been there.
I am still on the fence about this book. It is a useful compendium of decades of LGBT activism, but much of the material gathered here comes to life more vividly in other works. If you want to learn about AIDS activism in the 1980s, for example, it would make more sense to read Sean Strub’s memoir “Body Counts,” or watch the documentary “How to Survive a Plague” (David France), among others. For some, consulting these sources might require too much effort; at a humble 26 pages, the AIDS section of Faderman’s survey would be a faster way to go.
Nancy D. Kates co-produced and directed the 2003 documentary film “Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin” (with Bennett Singer), and produced and directed “Regarding Susan Sontag,” completed in 2014. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com