Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation

290 Pages·2012·50.89 MB·english

by  Dennis Altman

introduction to the 2012 printing i
Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics and Director of the Institute
for Human Security at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and was
Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard. He has written
eleven books exploring sexuality and politics, and their inter-
relationship in Australia, the United States, and now globally. These
include The Homosexualization of America, AIDS and the New
Puritanism, Rehearsals for Change, The Comfort of Men (a novel),
and his memoir Defying Gravity. His book Global Sex ( Chicago
University Press) has been translated into five languages. Most
recently he published Gore Vidal’s America (Polity) and Fifty First
State? (Scribe). In 2008, Altman was appointed a Member of the
Order of Australia.
homo
oppression & liberation
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d e n n i s a lt m a n
Homosexual_TitlePage.indd 1 24/11/11 4:45 PM
University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
[email protected]
© 1971 Dennis Altman
Afterword © 1993 Dennis Altman
Introduction © 1993 Jeffrey Weeks
Introduction © 2012 Dennis Altman
This edition published in Australia in 2012 by University of Queensland Press
by arrangement with Serpent’s Tail, UK.
First published 1971 by Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, New York, USA.
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior
written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover design by Design by Committee
Typeset in Sabon 10/12.5pt by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data entry is available
from the National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/
ISBN (pbk) 9780702249372
ISBN (pdf) 9780702248016
University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products
made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes
conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
This book is dedicated to Reinhard Hassert
and the women and men of Gay Liberation
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction to the 2012 Printing by Dennis Altman xi
Introduction to the 1993 Printing by Jeffrey Weeks 1
Introduction to the 1971 Printing by Dennis Altman 16
1. Coming Out: The Search for Identity 20
2. Oppression: The Denial of Identity 50
3. Liberation: Toward the Polymorphous Whole 80
4. The Movement and Liberation: Confrontation
and the Community 117
5. The Collapsing Hegemony and Gay Liberation 163
6. The Impact of Gay Liberation 197
7. Conclusion: The End of the Homosexual? 237
Afterword 249
Bibliography 261
Index 271
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed to the making of this book, pre-
eminently of course the people about whom I have written. My life
has been greatly enriched by the warmth with which I was greeted by
men and women from gay liberation in various cities of America, and I
hope that this book will in some small way reflect my feeling for them.
Equally, I have been greatly helped by large numbers of col-
leagues, both faculty and student, at the University of Sydney. Their
encouragement and interest was often what I needed to force myself
back to the typewriter.
It is invidious to single out individuals for special thanks, but I do
want to mention in New York Harris Dienstfrey, Paul Goodman, La
Mont Mitchell, Lillian Roxon, Phillip Spitzer, Marvin Surkin, and John
Ware; in Boston Rick and Leonie Gordon; in Los Angeles Christopher
Isherwood; in London Jim Anderson and David Fernbach; and in
Sydney Terry Irving, Judy Keene, Sylvia Krietsch, and Henry Mayer.
This book is dedicated to Reinhard Hassert; it is sufficient to say
that without him it would probably never have been written.
ix
Introduction to
the 2012 Printing
dennis altman
I wrote Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation after living
in New York City over the winter of 1970–1, when I was lucky
enough to become part of the emerging gay liberation movement,
and to work for a time on the Come Out! newspaper. Thanks to a
lukewarm review in Time magazine, and a more enthusiastic one by
Martin Duberman in The New York Times, the book survived its
first publication by an obscure publisher to become a mass market
paperback, and to be subsequently translated into several languages.
In Australia, Richard Walsh, then managing Angus & Robertson,
acquired the book and published it in 1973. Homosexual was re-
issued in 1993 by New York University Press, with a forward by my
British colleague and friend, Jeffrey Weeks, and the book’s fortieth
anniversary is being celebrated in Melbourne early in 2012.
Homosexual was written in a particular historical moment, when
the gay liberation movement in a few Western countries emerged
from the radical mix of politics, culture, and lifestyles of the early
1970s. The modern gay movement is dominated by its American
xi
xii introduction to the 2012 printing
history and its roots in American cultural politics. This dominance
has led to an almost deliberate obliteration of history, of the origins
of homosexual organizing in post-World War I Germany, and its
subsequent emergence in some other countries of Western Europe.
The myth of Stonewall, the riots that followed a police raid on a gay
bar in New York in 1969, means that too many people forget the
early gay movements in France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland
and the emergence of radical gay activism in 1968 in France and
Italy, which I barely knew about when I wrote the book.
In Australia, the first major homosexual rights organization, the
Campaign Against Moral Persecution—so named because of the
acronym, CAMP, a word already going out of fashion to describe
homosexuals—emerged in Sydney largely independent of what was
happening in the United States. I was in the States during the first
months of CAMP’s existence, and came back with missionary zeal
to spread gay liberation ideas.
Coming out as homosexual remained sufficiently rare forty years
ago, which ensured considerable publicity; my most public moment
came in July 1972 when I appeared on the ABC television program
Monday Conference, whose compere, Robert More, introduced the
book as “a personal attack on conventional morality.” This was the
one statement he, I, and the other two panelists—Rev. Roger Bush
and Liberal MP Peter Coleman—could agree on. That the panel
was all male (which I noted publicly) says a lot about the “pro-
gressive” views of the ABC at the time. But this was a time when
homosexual behavior remained a crime in all Australian states,
and Coleman feared that decriminalization would encourage more
young men (again, my opponents resolutely ignored women) to
become homosexual.
Despite Coleman’s fears, the following year saw the House of
Representatives resolve that: “Homosexual acts between consent-
ing adults in private should not be subject to the criminal law.” At
the end of the year South Australia became the first Australian juris-
diction to abolish the nineteenth century anti-sodomy law. It took
introduction to the 2012 printing xiii
over twenty years, and an appeal to the United Nations Human
Rights Committee by Tasmanian Nick Toonen, for the last of these
laws to be abolished, during which thousands of women and men
became involved in the growing number of homosexual organiza-
tions that had emerged since the early 1970s.
The intellectual origins of gay liberation resided in a heady
amalgam of countercultural and radical ideas derived from
Freud and Marx. Thus it was something of a shock to encounter
criticisms from younger queer academics in the 1990s that it was
an essentialist movement, reinforcing conventional assumptions
of a fixed sexuality. Most of the early gay liberationists had not
read Freud or Marx, let alone their most radical interpreters, such
as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, but they did champion
ideas of sexual fluidity and experimentation. By the early 1970s,
gay liberation groups had largely collapsed, replaced by new
organizations such as the (aptly named?) U.S. National Gay Task
Force. As the mainstream movement began to develop a model of
identity politics based on analogies with ethnic groups, it became
attracted to biological ideas about the fixed and immutable nature
of sexual attraction. It also moved away from the assumptions of
gay liberation, developing instead an ever-growing list of sexual
identities. Thus “bisexuality” became a new political identity,
rather than, as gay liberationists had believed, a normal human
ability to be sexually attracted to other humans irrespective of
gender.
The decade following the original publication of Homosexual
saw a rapid growth in lesbian and gay community organizations
and businesses, and a gradual demolition of some of the worst
barriers to acceptance, at least in Western societies. While struggles
for law reform continued—most particularly in New South Wales,
which included homosexuality in its anti-discrimination laws before
it abolished criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior—there
was a growing move towards respectability. Both the radical r hetoric
of gay liberation, and the extreme stigma and social disapproval