Variously called a riot, a rebellion, an uprising, the events at the Stonewall Inn down on Christopher Street in New York City in June 1969 were momentous. As historians note\u2014and as Jack Halberstam underscores in their essay 13\/13: Unbuild The World!<\/a> \u2014there had been political organizing much earlier, at least since the 1950s, a whirlwind of radical thinking going on, and many precursors to Stonewall, including riots in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and sit-ins in Philadelphia during the 1960s.[1]<\/a>\u00a0But for New Yorkers whose view of the world<\/a> is famously depicted in the New Yorker<\/em> cover of March 29, 1976 by Saul Steinberg\u2014and I count myself as one\u2014the uprising at Stonewall sparked the revolution. Perhaps, as Edmund White suggests, in the same way that the taking of the Bastille became a symbol of the revolution that followed. Regardless of what sparked it, though, the social transformation was real and has had remarkable effects. Those early uprisings triggered what is often called \u201cthe Gay Revolution\u201d and its progeny, including all the social movements to protect and advance the lives of LGBTQ people and to proliferate the categories within the meaning of LGBTQ\u2014\u201cto become numerous,\u201d in the words of Che Gossett, who gave us the title for our seminar.<\/p>\n At Revolution 8\/13, we will be reading and discussing the histories, interviews, and oral accounts of the LGBTQ Revolution, of ACT UP, of Stonewall and other uprisings, of the social movements for trans* lives and #BlackTransLivesMatter\u2014and more generally, we will explore with Che Gossett and Jack Halberstam the possibilities of a future that is \u201cgenderless, gender variable, gender optional, gender hacked,\u201d in Jack Halberstam\u2019s words.[2]<\/a> In this short introduction, I would like to propose a hypothesis, note a paradox, and emphasize one inextricable link.<\/p>\n The hypothesis first. In reviewing our readings, as well as histories of the LGBTQ uprisings, what strikes me is that the vanguard of these social movements were often persons who were deeply involved in other<\/em> social movements, such as the Civil Rights and peace movements, and who rose up against the oppression of LGBTQ persons as a subsequent matter, which felt perhaps even more compelling.<\/p>\n Sylvia Rivera had been involved in the Black liberation movement and the peace movement.[3]<\/a> As Rivera explains, she had been involved in a lot of other movement work, but when she got down to Stonewall that night, she felt finally at home in revolution: \u201cIt was, like, a godsent thing,\u201d Rivera says. \u201cI just happened to be there when it all jumped off. I said, \u2018Well, great, now it\u2019s my time,\u2019 Here, I\u2019m out there being a revolutionists for everybody else. I said now it\u2019s time to do my thing for my people.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n Kiyoshi Kuromiya had been active in the Civil Rights movement, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., and others\u2014as Che Gossett documents. Kuromiya had been involved in sit-ins in Maryland in 1962 and other protests as part of the Civil Rights movement, and those activist experiences contributed to Kuromiya founding the Gay Liberation Front in Philadelphia in 1969.[5]<\/a> Those experiences also contributed to his later work with ACT UP. Chris Barlett notes<\/a> that Kuromiya \u201cbrought what he learned from the Civil Rights, Gay Liberation and other movements to all of the work he did, and wherever people struggled for human rights and dignity, he was there.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, it was praxis that sparked praxis.<\/p>\n It is difficult to identify a particular manifesto or declaration or founding text that operates in the same way as Marx\u2019s Communist Manifesto<\/em> or, as we were discussing last seminar<\/a>, George Jackson\u2019s Soledad Brother.<\/em> What seems to have been the spark of the LGBTQ revolution, at least at the incipient stage of Stonewall and other uprisings, was the experience of other protest movements. It was protest coming home in a way.<\/p>\n Now, in the 1970s and with regard to the progeny of the gay revolution\u2014the development of queer theory and now the theorization of gender variability, including for instance Jack Halberstam\u2019s Trans* <\/em>and Paul Preciado\u2019s Testo Junkie<\/em> and Counter-sexual Manifesto\u2014<\/em>those were heavily influenced by texts such as Michel Foucault\u2019s History of Sexuality<\/em>, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick\u2019s Epistemology of the Closet<\/em>, and Judith Butler\u2019s Gender Trouble<\/em>.[6]<\/a>\u00a0But my hypothesis for now is that the early moments of the LGBTQ revolution were more deeply connected to earlier revolutionary praxis than they were to manifestoes and the written word.<\/p>\n This may be a case of praxis generating praxis\u2014which may be somewhat unique among the radical movements we are exploring this year at Revolution 13\/13. It\u2019s a hypothesis we might want to come back to in the seminar.<\/p>\n Second, a paradox. I was struck by Randy Wicker\u2019s original response to the Stonewall uprising, in his interview with Marsha P. Johnson and Eric Marcus. Wicker had been an early activist and member of the Mattachine Society of New York, and his first reaction to Stonewall was deep concern that it was setting back the gay movement. Wicker recounts, when he first heard about Stonewall and the activists forming a chorus line and kicking their heels at the police:<\/p>\n I was horrified. I mean, the last thing to me that I thought at the time they were setting back the gay liberation movement twenty years, because I mean all these TV shows and all this work that we had done to try to establish legitimacy of the gay movement that we were nice middle-class people like everybody else and, you know, adjusted and all that. And suddenly there was all this, what I considered riffraff.[7]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This passage raises the constant tension, in the gay rights movement, between the strategies of normalization and its opposite, recognizing or emphasizing difference. This was especially true during the same-sex marriage debates when many gay-friendly critics objected to the normalizing tendencies involved in equalizing towards marriage\u2014rather than say, for instance, abolishing the institution altogether. This also ties importantly to the question of respectability politics.<\/p>\n I was reading this morning Dwight Garner\u2019s appraisal of P.J. O\u2019Rourke, the conservative commentator, on his passing, and I was struck by the statement O\u2019Rourke made, speaking of himself, that \u201cthe weirder you\u2019re going to behave, the more normal you should look.\u201d[8]<\/a> There\u2019s definitely something to that\u2014and I have taken advantage of that many times, donning a suit and tie when I need to defend some of my more extreme positions. In the death penalty context for instance, I\u2019ve always felt more persuasive and powerful arguing abolitionist positions when I am dressed more conservatively than the prosecutor or judge. It\u2019s almost as if it is a way to outflank your opponent. I\u2019m sure it is included, somewhere, in Arthur Schopenhauer\u2019s brilliant Art of Always Being Right<\/em>.<\/p>\n Perhaps because of the dimension of sexuality and because of the phenomenon of the closet, the temptation to normalize, instead of embracing difference, was maybe more acute in the context of early gay activism than in the later LGBTQ revolution and other struggle contexts. And it likely was effective in mainstreaming what had previously been considered and treated as mental disorder\u2014as soon as psychiatry emerged as a field in the nineteenth century and in the mid-twentieth when homosexuality and other \u201cperversions\u201d were officially diagnosed as mental disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders<\/em>.<\/p>\n It is precisely this tension that Che Gossett emphasizes in their discussion of Kiyoshi Kuromiya<\/a>. Gossett starts from Kuromiya\u2019s insistence that the movement not<\/em> replicate the systemic biases of the \u201cwhite middle-class outlook,\u201d as some of the early moments of the movement did, but instead center the experiences and stand in solidarity \u201cwith the poor, with women, with people of color, with the antiwar people,\u201d in Kuromiya\u2019s words, to \u201cbring the whole corrupt thing down.\u201d Che Gossett, drawing on Kuromiya, strenuously rejects the strategy to normalize, in part because of the inextricable link between the history of LGBTQ oppression and the carceral state (which I address next).<\/p>\n The tension is also reflected in Jack Halberstam\u2019s suggestion in Trans* <\/em>that the term queer in the 1990s and 2000s was intended to be a critique of assimilationism, and that today, the term trans* \u201cmarks a politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation.\u201d[9]<\/a> That notion of social transformation versus accommodation is precisely the tension that has been at the heart of much of the LGBTQ revolution. It is, perhaps, the tension we see in other contexts between reform and abolition (as we studied last year in Abolition Democracy 13\/13<\/a>), or more generally, reform or revolution (as in the debate between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg that we discussed with Amy Allen in Revolution 5\/13<\/a>). We may want to explore that tension, and any differences, at our upcoming seminar.<\/p>\n In their essay on Kiyoshi Kuromiya\u2019s legacy<\/a>, Che Gossett underscores the inextricable link between the historical criminalization of homosexuality and the structural racism of our criminal legal process. This link is clear in the life, for instance, of Marsha Johnson. You can hear it in her interview with Eric Marcus, when Marcus asks Johnson \u201cwere you afraid of being arrested\u201d at Stonewall. \u201cOh, no,\u201d Johnson responded, \u201cbecause I\u2019d been going to jail for, like, ten years before the Stonewall. I was going to jail \u2018cause I was, I was originally up on Forty-second Street. And every time we\u2019d go, you know, like going out to hustle all the time they would just get us and tell us we were under arrest.\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n In their essay, Che Gossett traces the deep and long-standing imbrication of the LGBTQ movement and struggles against the carceral state, taking us to the Walla Walla and Angola prisons that were the locations of the George Jackson Brigade and the \u201cSelf-Help Alliance Group\u201d (SHAG) respectively, in 1977 and 1984, both aimed at combatting sexual violence against LGBTQ persons in prison. This relationship is integral to understanding both abolition and the urgency of queer and trans issues today, and it too may be part of our discussion at the seminar.<\/p>\n We turn, then, in Revolution 8\/13 to the revolutionary praxis of LGBTQ movements. I could not be more honored and humbled to be joined by two brilliant critical thinkers whose work and writings and praxis lie at the very heart of these matters:\u00a0Che Gossett<\/a>, Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at the IJS<\/a> at Columbia, and Jack Halberstam<\/a>, Professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University.<\/p>\n Welcome to Revolution 8\/13<\/a>!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> See generally<\/em> Jason Baumann,\u00a0\u201cIntroduction,\u201d in The Stonewall Reader<\/em>, ed. Jason Baumann\u00a0<\/em>(New York: Penguin, 2019), xv.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability <\/em>(Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 21.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Sylvia Rivera in The Stonewall Reader<\/em>, 141.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Sylvia Rivera in The Stonewall Reader<\/em>, 142.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Kuromiya in The Stonewall Reader<\/em>, 238.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era<\/em>, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013); Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto<\/em>, trans. Kevin Gerry Dunn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality<\/em>, vol. 1, An Introduction<\/em>, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Randy Wicker interview in \u201cMarsha P. Johnson and Randy Wicker,\u201d in The Stonewall Reader<\/em>, 139.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Dwight Garner, \u201cWith O\u2019Rourke, Readers Were in the Right Hands,\u201d New York Times<\/em>, February 19, 2022, p. C4.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Halberstam, Trans*<\/em>, 50.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Marsha P. Johnson in The Stonewall Reader<\/em>, 138.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Bernard E. Harcourt Variously called a riot, a rebellion, an uprising, the events at the Stonewall Inn down on Christopher Street in New York City in June 1969 were momentous. As historians note\u2014and as Jack Halberstam underscores in their… Continue Reading When Praxis Generates Praxis<\/h1>\n
The Problem of Normalization<\/h1>\n
Integral to Abolition<\/h1>\n
Notes<\/h1>\n