Guest Post: From gay Nazis to 'we're here, we're queer': A century of arguing about gay pride

Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington

This month, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will join gay pride marches in cities big and small. In many cities, pride marches are controversial. In some – like Moscow – they are even banned. But for many people in North America, parts of Europe, Latin America and elsewhere, attending the local pride march has become an unremarkable ritual of summer.

Gay pride parade, Washington, DC, 1988

There are still good reasons to march. Few countries around the world have robust protections for gay and transgender rights. And pride marches, the LGBTQ political rallies that take the form of exuberant, outrageous parades, often meet hostile counterdemonstrators.

But such expressions of pride have faced another sort of opposition: from within the queer and trans communities themselves. One reason is that gay and trans rights doesn’t describe a single, unitary political movement.

I am a historian of queer and trans politics. My research, together with that of James Steakley, Katie Sutton, Robert Beachy and many others, shows that there are several traditions of gay and trans activism. These traditions have not always gotten along. And some of them hate what pride is all about.

A history of multiple movements

Gay and trans rights movements are quite old. For more than 100 years, political groups have been fighting on behalf of same-sex desires, gender nonconformity and transition from one gender to the other – although the terms “gay rights” and “trans rights” are relatively recent inventions.

By the late 1800s, a movement that called itself “homosexual emancipation” formed in Germany. It boomed after World War I and flourished in the 1920s under the democracy that existed before the Nazis took over. The movement included people who called themselves “transvestites.” Were they alive today, many would probably use the term transgender.

From the beginning, gay and transgender activists split into a dizzying array of factions. All were in favor of greater legal and social tolerance for same-sex relationships. But beyond that narrow common ground, they were a political hodgepodge.

Some were leftists. One prominent leader of a gay rights group was also an important player in Berlin’s communist party. Others were middle-of-the road, calling for the end of Germany’s law against sodomy but otherwise content with the status quo. There were even right-wing, explicitly racist gay rights activists.

The Nazi Party itself was zealously anti-gay. Once in power, the Nazis murdered thousands of men for the “crime” of male-male sex. Yet, the historical record shows that a small number of men quietly belonged to both the homosexual emancipation movement and the Nazi Party, though they were not open about their sexuality within the party. Historians are still debating the significance of homosexuality in the Nazi Party. The small faction of gay fascists lauded erotic relationships between manly, “Aryan” soldier types while loathing feminists, Jews and leftists.

As you might imagine, these different camps within the homosexual emancipation movement did not agree on lots of things.

A debate about discretion

One of their big disagreements was about discretion: Was it acceptable for same-sex couples and gender nonconformists to cavort in view of the straight public?

The 1972 film ‘Cabaret’ is set in Berlin prior to the Nazi seizure of power. The story deals with homosexuality and the rise of Nazism.

Fifty years before pride marches began, 1920s Berlin had a jumping nightlife of gay male, lesbian and transvestite establishments featuring clubs like the Eldorado – known for its cross-dressing wait staff – and dance palaces like the Magic Flute. There was even a yearly all-women moonlight cruise. The pre-Nazi government’s approach was live and let live.

Not all advocates of gay rights, however, liked this public culture.

One man, a self-professed gay Nazi, wrote that Berlin’s clubs were “insalubrious” places where people surrendered to their animal lusts, and that “the general public inevitably gets the impression that it” – that is, the gay rights movement – “is all about sex.” This man wanted to celebrate homoerotic comradeship, a spiritual love, as he described it, as well as a physical one. However, he wanted to celebrate this manly love with maximum discretion, and certainly not in public. He wrote: “What two men do in the barracks,” by which he meant the barracks of the Nazi Party militia, “is no one’s business.”

Such complaints were not limited to the far right. Moderate activists had their own doubts about the bars and dance halls. One leader of transvestites warned, “When we demand that the public acknowledge us, then we have the duty to dress and conduct ourselves publicly in an inconspicuous manner.” Transvestites were told to avoid gaudy accessories like costume rings or oversized earrings.

To admit that one was homosexual or a transvestite in public in the 1920s was to court serious social and legal consequences. Activists of that era probably could not have imagined that one day people would march in large groups down public streets celebrating their homosexual and transgender selves.

‘We’re here, we’re queer’

In 1970, activists organized the first pride marches to mark the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Those riots occurred the summer before when people fought back against a police raid of a queer bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Pride exploded the old worries about discretion when it arrived in cities around the world in the 1970s.

Pride reveled in gaudy accessories. It had lots of scanty dress, too, from drag queens in slinky gowns to shirtless dykes with political slogans scrawled in marker across their chests. By bringing the party – along with the politics – into the streets in broad daylight, pride fought against homophobia. At the same time, it flatly rejected the old fears about overt public displays.

“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” a favorite chant at pride, was not only directed at mainstream, straight society. It was also, in my opinion, an answer-back to the debate about discretion that had marked the long history of gay and trans activism.

More debates about pride

By the 1990s, pride marches had run into more controversy within activist circles. They were criticized as too commercial, too male-dominated, too devoid of a broader left-of-center political agenda and insufficiently inclusive of people of color – or indeed downright racist and Islamophobic. Alternative demonstrations cropped up, like Berlin’s Alternative Pride and New York City’s Dyke March. Debates about pride continue to this day.

Pride is in part what people make of it. A pride march can have a social justice agenda. Or it can have a pro-Trump agenda.

Yet pride’s history is a story of a radical break with right-wing and even middle-of-the-road gay and trans politics. Pride rejected respectability and discretion.

Traces of that history probably survive in your local pride march. Look for the people who are not worried about alarming the straights.

Laurie Marhoefer, Assistant Professor of History, University of Washington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Faggots, punks, and prostitutes: the evolving language of gay men

Peter Robinson, Swinburne University of Technology

Joe Jackson’s 1982 hit Real Men was the first time I had heard gays referred to as faggots. I was just out of the closet and in my first gay relationship in London. Jackson’s lyrics about how only our friends and other gays could call us faggots was encouraging, coming as it did from a straight man singing a song just before AIDS hit.

Faggot, often-considered a slur, has been reclaimed many times over by gay men, including in a new play by Declan Greene, The Homosexuals, or “Faggots”, currently showing at the Malthouse in Melbourne. The play looks at gay male relationships and their politics, and is apt as middle-class gay men and lesbians struggle with acceptance all over again in the face of their call for marriage equality.

My friends and I called ourselves fags because it was a way of turning the abuse on its head and laughing at the straight bullies.

And in merry-old-England there was abuse: one night when leaving gay club Heaven, a bunch of lads called us and our female friends “pooh jabbers”. It was graphic and offensive (“bum bandit” being a similar, anal-fixated term from about the same time) and it occurred to me how deeply, viscerally they hated us.

Language defines who you are. But words used by others to define gay people can say a great deal more about them than us.

From prostitutes to gays

Let’s begin with the most common term, “gay”, which baby-boomer homosexuals appropriated for their liberationist cause in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its pedigree is longer and according to Edmund White originally applied to women and meant loose or immoral, as in a prostitute. And “gay-house” was the term for a brothel. “In the past one asked if a woman was "gay,” much as today one might ask if she “swings,”“ wrote White.

"Homosexual” (or “homosexualist”) has similar 19th-century origins and was originally coined in 1869 by a Hungarian doctor, Karoly Maria Benkert.

“Faggot” has had different meanings according to where and when it was used. In eighteenth-century London it was first a term for prostitute then for homosexual. In 1920s New York, it described an effeminate homosexual who sought social/sexual relations with “normal men”, according to George Chauncey while a “flaming faggot” was an extremely obvious, flamboyant gay man.

In 1970s Australia, the ubiquitous “poofter” covered all forms of deviancy including men who had sex with other men, poor-performing sportsmen, politicians and motorists. Meanwhile, as the documentary Deep Water revealed, the literal bashing and killing of poofters caught at it in public parklands was something of a pastime.

“Cat” from “catamite” is ancient Roman with connotations of effeminacy, prostitution, and the passive role in a sexual encounter. “Fruit” was, like faggot, according to US historian Randolph Trumbach, a term first used in the 18th century for a prostitute and then a sodomite. “Fairy” and “queer” had similar origins between the world wars.

Why the fixation on prostitution? As Trumbach explains, there is a “long tradition in English usage” of words that are used to designate a prostitute being appropriated one generation later to describe sodomites.

This tendency for the words for prostitute to be later used for homosexual dates from 18th-century England when they often shared common social spaces, argues gay historian Rictor Norton.

Much later, historians such as Chad Heap and George Chauncey found similar intermingling in the underground bars that operated in New York and Chicago during Prohibition in the US.

The words gays use for themselves

Because of the sardonic nature of gayness, all of the above would have to be included also in the vocabulary of gay men and queers.

As well, there are community-specific terms, such as “clone”. Historically-specific, it connotes the style of gay men mid-1970 to mid-1980s (moustache, short hair, faded, baggy Levis and pocket and/or neck handkerchief) as exemplified by the lead singer of the Bronski Beat at the time of their hit single, Smalltown Boy.

More arcane terms include “ganymede” (a young male) which was used by Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries and “Marianne” and “Molly” from the earlier 18th century, again connoting an effeminate (or passive) male.

“Nance” and “nancy boy” as well as “Nelly” and “nellies” were terms used by both gays and straights also connoting effeminacy or youthfulness. According to one of writer Keith Vacha’s interviewees, nellies were “common queens” by which he meant: “ones with bleached blonde hair and plucked eyebrows”.

And finally, perhaps to the consternation of some of today’s toughs, there is “punk,” which according to Rudolph Trumbach was once the slang term for both prostitute and sodomite.

Terms of abuse and endearment

Terms of abuse are a way of distinguishing those whom we choose to marginalise because we do not like the look of them or because we were there first. In other words, they are the “outsiders” of sociologist Norbert Elias’s important work from the mid-1960s.

Humans have been doing this from the outset. Gangs and groups, them and us, and in the case of sexual preference, there are the straights, the “normals”, if you like, and the others, the sexual outcasts.

The terms I’ve illustrated were used by the majority to exclude prostitutes and homosexuals from “polite” society. While these terms were used to mark their difference, this did not prevent males from that same polite society from using the good services of prostitutes and homosexuals when it suited them. And as they did so then, they still do so now.

What is also interesting is the way in which sexual outcasts could adopt terms of abuse used for them and turn them into terms of endearment for each other — as my friends and I did in the 1980s when we called ourselves fags. And so, self mockery becomes a form of defence against the strictures of the priests and preachers.

It was literally the priests and the preachers, and later doctors and lawyers, who sought to demarcate “useful” sexual activity from wasted sexual activity. According to historian Michel Foucault the monogamous heterosexual couple produced new workers; those erotic and sexual activities that detracted from or weakened it were identified, categorised, and punished by law.

That young, gay men are now starting to reclaim these words is significant. It could mean that they are becoming interested in finding out where they have came from, that is, what are the origins of the culture they inhabit?

Twenty-one years ago, AIDS, which was then the dominant concern for gay men and culture, ceased to be a death sentence and instead became a manageable disease. Young men who have grown up since then could feel that other aspects of gay life can now be explored with greater freedom.

If this is so, it would suggest a strengthening of gay culture and community because people can only start exploring their past, warts and all, when they feel safe.

The Homosexuals, or “Faggots” will be showing at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre until March 12.

Peter Robinson, Senior lecturer in History and Sociology, Swinburne University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring discusses federal gay marriage appeals

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 14, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring discusses federal gay marriage appeals

After offering opening remarks to the participants at the third annual Charlottesville Gay Pride Festival in Lee Park on September 13, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring spoke to reporters about the same-sex marriage cases that may be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in its coming term.

Answering questions posed by the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner, Herring, a Democrat who served in the state Senate before his 2013 election as attorney general, explained how his mind has been changed about gay marriage.

As a senator, Herring had voted in favor of the so-called Marshall-Newman amendment, which added a prohibition on same-sex marriage and civil unions to the bill of rights section of the Virginia Constitution. As attorney general, he refused to defend the amendment and statutes banning gay marriage when they were challenged by same-sex couples seeking legal recognition of their marriages.

After his 2006 vote supporting the constitutional ban, Herring explained, “I saw how it hurt a lot of people. That made me continue to question whether that was the right decision.”

'See things differently'
In the intervening years, he said, “I talked to a lot of people – people at work, constituents, my family -- and I see things very differently now.”

At the time of the marriage amendment vote, Herring said, he was “working to end discrimination but I stopped short of full marriage equality. I came to see that that was wrong, and a lot of people were hurt by it.”

Equality, he continued, “is a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence. Nobody deserves to be discriminated against. Our Constitution guarantees not only gay and lesbian couples equality, it guarantees all Americans equality.”

During its upcoming September 29 conference, the U.S. Supreme Court will be looking at certiorari petitions from various states where anti-same-sex-marriage laws have been challenged. Virginia's case is among them.

“The Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia cases are all now before the Supreme Court on petitions for appeal,” Herring explained.

“Those petitions have been fully briefed as to whether the cases should be taken by the Court. Whether it's Virginia's case or whether it's one of the others or a group of them, it's difficult to predict.” Nonetheless, Herring added, “I feel confident that the court will consider whether to take one, or some, or all of these cases.”

Virginia's case involves two couples, one a male couple from Norfolk who sought a local marriage license and were denied it. The other is a female couple who were legally married in California and adopted a child, but whose marriage goes unrecognized by Virginia, leading to complications regarding the custody status of the adopted child.

Herring explained that “Virginia's case would address all of those legal issues,” adding that “it would be good for Virginia. Not only do I feel we have a really strong legal team but the Commonwealth, I know and we know, has moved forward since the key landmark civil rights decisions over the last 50 years where Virginia was on the wrong side.”

Brown and Loving
Herring noted that the famous 1954 decision that ended racial segregation of government schools, Brown v. Board of Education, included a case from Prince Edward County, Virginia, but “Virginia and its attorney general argued against school desegregation and on the wrong side.”

In the 1967 case that overturned miscegenation laws, Loving v. Virginia, he said, “a couple from Caroline County was denied a marriage license because they were of different races. And again, Virginia argued on the wrong side of that key, landmark decision.”

Herring said he hopes that, “when we look at this issue in the future, people all around the country and our children will know that Virginia was on the right side of history and on the right side of law.”

By deciding not to defend Virginia's laws in these cases, he said, “as Attorney General, I was going to make sure that the injustices in those other landmark civil rights cases would not be repeated this time.”

SUGGESTED LINKS

Author Charles Murray argues same-sex marriage is ‘not a big deal’
Virginia U.S. Senate candidates react to Fourth Circuit gay marriage ruling
Author David Lampo brings gay-rights message to conservative Republicans
Senate candidate E.W. Jackson defends anti-gay stance as ‘fundamental’
‘Flagrant Conduct’ author Dale Carpenter discusses how sodomy laws ended

Original URL:  http://www.examiner.com/article/virginia-attorney-general-mark-herring-discusses-federal-gay-marriage-appeals

From the Archives: Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring highlights opposition to drug-law reform

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 14, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring highlights opposition to drug-law reform

After welcoming participants to the third annual Charlottesville gay pride celebration in Lee Park on Saturday, September 13, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring answered questions from reporters.

In addition to discussing his views on same-sex marriage and sexual orientation discrimination, Herring addressed concerns about drug abuse and proposed reforms to drug laws.

Earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes among its members former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, as well as the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, recommended to the United Nations that currently illicit drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and marijuana should be decriminalized and that the abuse of these drugs should be treated as a health problem not as a criminal matter.

'Deaths and fatalities'
Acknowledging that he has not read the UN commission's report, Herring, a Democrat elected in 2013, said that “as attorney general, one of the first things I did in coming to office is go on a public safety tour all across the Commonwealth. I talked to over 60 different jurisdictions – the law enforcement, commonwealth's attorneys, local elected officials – because I wanted to hear directly from them about the public safety threats that they were facing.

“Over and over in those meetings, one of the things I heard was the problems associated with opiate addiction, prescription drug addiction, and the spike in heroin overdoses and deaths and fatalities.”

Herring said that, based upon what he learned from local officials, “I want to go after those who would put that kind of poison, [such as] potent, deadly heroin, out on the streets. I'm going to aggressively prosecute that and work with local prosecutors to do it. We're going to step up our prevention and education efforts and we're going to partner with local jurisdictions and the U.S. Attorney's office to combat the problem of drug abuse.”

'Not trying to be evasive'
Asked specifically if he opposes drug-law reform efforts, Herring said flatly: “I don't support legalizing all of those dangerous drugs like heroin and opiates that are killing and claiming so many lives of young people.”

With regard to marijuana legalization, Herring hesitated and added, “I'm not trying to be evasive. I know a couple of states have begun to take those steps and before Virginia takes those steps I think we ought to see what [are] the experiences in the other states and then assess it.”

That position is almost identical to that of Herring's predecessor as attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli.

In February 2013, when he was running for governor, Cuccinelli explained to an audience of Albemarle County Republicans that “having data from a couple of states, whole states, that go down this path may not be good news but it will be interesting and it will be something we can learn from,"

Cuccinelli added that legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington state is “a peculiar subject but I do think it's important that states try some things they think are appropriate and whether the federal government approves or not, the rest of us watch and learn.”

SUGGESTED LINKS

Ken Cuccinelli clarifies remarks on marijuana legalization as federalism issue
GOP lieutenant governor candidate E. W. Jackson 'certainly used marijuana'
Justin Bieber, Gary Becker, and the future of marijuana prohibition
Virginia Congressman Morgan Griffith clarifies aim of his medical marijuana bill
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring discusses federal gay marriage appeals

Original URL:  http://www.examiner.com/article/virginia-attorney-general-mark-herring-highlights-opposition-to-drug-law-reform