Elizabeth A. Armstrong. Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xix + 280 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-02694-7.
Reviewed by William H. Issel (San Francisco State University)
Published on H-California (March, 2003)
Sociology in the Service of History: Theorizing the Lesbian/Gay Movement in San Francisco
Sociology in the Service of History: Theorizing the Lesbian/Gay Movement in San Francisco
Sociologist Elizabeth A. Armstrong puts an important aspect of the history of sexuality in San Francisco under the microscope in this study, which began as a 1998 doctoral dissertation at Berkeley. Mindful of the importance of resource mobilization and political process theories but convinced that previous accounts of social change movements downplayed cultural dynamics, the author offers a "cultural institutional" explanation of the "organizing" of "the Lesbian/Gay Movement" (LGM) from the 1950s through the 1990s. Her work focuses on San Francisco, but she aspires to create more than a city biography or a social science case study. Instead, Armstrong seeks to advance understanding of the nationwide Lesbian/Gay movement and expects that her findings will clarify the history of other social movements influenced by the New Left. In particular, the author is determined to challenge notions associated with the discourse about "the death of the commons" and suggests that the case of the LGM demonstrates that self-interested individualism does not necessarily produce apathy and may instead stimulate community involvement and civic participation.
Armstrong argues that the LGM began as a single interest political reform endeavor but underwent transformation by New Left notions of personal authenticity and individual fulfillment. LGM "crystallization" then took place, and a new "field" organized around "identity politics" emerged that subsequently defined the character of the LGM. Individualistic self-expression as a Gay/Lesbian person coexisted with building numerous social and political associations, participating in annual parades celebrating Gay community pride, and patronizing a proliferating array of sexual-expression business establishments. While the LGM "privileged the identity logic," it also contained "interest group" and "pleasure-seeking logics" that existed in tension with one another. The stresses and strains associated with the AIDS crisis, plus critiques of identity politics during the 1990s created a "shifting balance between identity and interest group politics" (pp. 184-85) that makes it hard to predict the future character of the LGM.
The author develops her thesis in a two-stage argument beginning with four chapters devoted to the emergence of gay identity as the central theme of the LGM, followed by four chapters that describe the outcomes of the "crystallization" of the LGM around "Gay Identity." In the 1950s and through the 1960s, organizations such as the Mattachine Society, the Society for Individual Rights, and the Daughters of Bilitis provided supportive social environments and lobbied for political rights. Gay Liberation advocates in 1969 and 1970 challenged the priorities of the homosexual rights movement, redefined "coming out" to mean staking out a gay public identity rather than mimicking high society debutante cotillions, demanded "freedom now" to seek sexual pleasure outside heterosexual norms, and insisted upon fundamental social and economic changes in American society. By 1973, the LGM abandoned the agenda of "Gay Power" advocates of revolutionary transformation; "crystallization" took place around the concept of unity (in a political/social movement and community) in diversity (among distinct individuals expressing a variety of ways to be Gay). The "Field Formation" of the 1969-1973 period had consequences both positive and negative for the future growth and development of the LGM. If social movements can be said to have golden ages, then that of the LGM, according to Armstrong, was the period from the early 1970s to 1978, the year that Dan White murdered Gay supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone. However, even golden ages have limitations and the LGM's rhetoric of celebrating diversity coexisted uneasily with its relatively homogeneous social composition during the 1970s: predominantly middle-class, white, and male. Criticism of the limited gender, race, and class diversity of the LGM undercut the Movement's claim to being inclusive, while the AIDS crisis stimulated a reconsideration of the sexual pleasure dimension of the LGM and called into question the very survival of the Gay community. Armstrong devotes chapters to each of these challenges and concludes her analysis with an assessment of the continuities and changes that marked the LGM in the 1980s and 1990s. Forging Gay Identities makes excellent use of the relatively abundant existing scholarship on the history of the LGM in San Francisco, and to her credit Armstrong acknowledges the historians, archivists, and librarians whose work she builds upon. Her chief contribution to original empirical scholarship is the database of over 900 LGM organizations, which informs her analysis throughout the book. In common with many authors of first books based on dissertations, Armstrong tends to overstate the novelty and originality of her interpretation, and she mistakenly distinguishes her study from previous accounts on the basis that her work is analytical whereas that of earlier scholars was descriptive. In fact, the distinction that exists between her work and that of previous scholars is one between different types of analysis. In contrast to much of the existing work on the topic, Armstrong's approach de-emphasizes the individual as an agent of history. This is to be expected in a work of sociology, but her reluctance to offer due credit to individual agency exists in uneasy tension with her laudatory determination to credit the importance of choice-making based on cultural repertoires, temporality, and contingency. These shortcomings do not call into question the importance of this major interdisciplinary work. Armstrong's careful and thought-provoking study offers a sociological and ethnographic taxonomy of the LGM, set in the local and national historical context, with analytical categories linked to contemporary theoretical literature, that previous scholarship did not provide.
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Citation:
William H. Issel. Review of Armstrong, Elizabeth A., Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994.
H-California, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2003.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7341
Copyright © 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.