William A. Percy Foundation
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • Who we are
  • Recent Projects
    • Covid-19 in US Prisons
    • Qualitative Survey on Rape and Voluntary Sexual Activity in US Prisons (2020)
    • News & Resources: Prison Sex & Prison Rape
    • Theorizing Consent: Educational and Legal Perspectives on Campus Rape
    • Highlights on Prisoner Study (2016)
    • Research on Ancient Greek Tableware & the Roman Age of Marriage
    • Sexual Citizenship and Human Rights
  • Prison Book Donation Program
  • Opportunities to Engage
  • Contact
Search the site...
Home» News & Resources: review – Duberman: ‘Has the Gay Movement Failed?’

News & Resources: review – Duberman: ‘Has the Gay Movement Failed?’

Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed? University of California Press, 2018. Dr. Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the City University of New York, where he founded and directed the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, recipient of several Lambda Literary Awards, and honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Historical Association. He is the author of numerous historical biographies, of his own multivolume autobiography, and of pioneering texts like About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (1986), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989), and Stonewall (1994).

Below are some quotes from Has the Gay Movement Failed? – an important text.


CRIMINALIZATION OF YOUTH

p. 6 – A 2013 report by the centers for Disease Control found that 41% of high school students admitted to having had sexual intercourse. Another survey showed 42% of persons below age 19 had sex. Previous studies found even higher rates.

p. 22 – Carl Wittman, “Gay Manifesto” pamphlet in early 1969 (a month before the Stonewall riots) sponsored by the Gay Liberation Front, “remains in both style and argument the most resonant piece of writing … from the GLF period.”

p.25 – quote from Wittman: “Kids can take care of themselves, and are sexual beings way earlier than we’d like to admit…. Those of us who began cruising [for sex] in early adolescence know this, and we were doing the cruising, not being debauched by dirty old men.” Wittman decried society’s condemnation of sex by young people, saying that any harm caused by early sexual experiences is “undoubtedly less dangerous or unhealthy than is tobacco or alcohol.”

p. 78 – In GLF chapters of the early 1970s, “the burning – and most controversial – question related to age-of-consent laws. In approaching that issue, I start with a simple question. Did you have sex before you were sixteen? You did?… Almost all states have laws on their books that establish the legal age of sexual consent at 16.” He recognizes that determining which age is appropriate for sexual consent is a “thorny question” (p. 78) which can be an “endlessly debated conundrum” (p. 80). On pages 78 and 89, Duberman makes a strong critique of laws that forbid teenagers to have sex with each other, and he condemns imprisonment and sex-offender registries for such persons. He does not give explicit support for the right of prepubescent children to engage in bodily pleasure (though he does question that it is always wrong), but he does defend intergenerational relationships by citing other cultures (like the Berbers of Siwan Oasis in Egypt), where such relationships were common and socially accepted. His main point is that early gay liberationist organizations debated and defended such relationships, whereas current LGBT activist groups have completely abandoned the question of sexual rights for young people below age 16.


QUESTIONING THE AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

p. 109 – Duberman makes numerous references to the injustices of the American criminal “justice” system. He cites approvingly the work of Dean Spade, founder of the Rivera Law Project and a professor at the Seattle University School of Law. that “opposition to the justice system should include strenuous opposition to prison expansion. Currently, there are some 2.3 million people in our jails; we lock up more citizens than any other country.”

p. 110 – “Mainstream gay organizations have played almost no role in the resistance to hiring more cops, building more jails, criminalizing more behaviors, and lengthening more sentences – though many gay citizens are suffering from the consequences.”

p. 111 – Duberman “urges a shift of attention from jailing ‘sex offenders’ to making greater efforts to work against the social violence of everyday life among the most vulnerable among us – children, say, or trans people – and to providing direct support, for example, to homeless queer people and those subject to deportation. As our prison system stands, it doesn’t help prisoners, many of whom are incarcerated for minor offenses (like being caught with a little pot), and it apparently doesn’t make the rest of us any safer…. Putting our energy toward promoting harsher sentencing takes it away from the more difficult and more important work of changing our culture.”

p. 173 – “Gay Liberation Front activists in 1970 staged several demonstrations in front of the [New York City] Women’s House of Detention calling up to the prisoners ‘Power to the sisters!’ and the prisoners calling back, ‘Power to the gay people!’ Even after GLF became defunct, other gay groups maintained the connection, as Regina Kunzel has written, ‘Political connections between lesbian and gay activists and prison inmates persisted as an important and under-recognized feature of the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Many marches and demonstrations of the movement’s early years chose jails and prisons as rallying sites.’’ Cite: Regina Kunzel, “Lessons in Being Gay: Queer Encounters in Gay and Lesbian Prison Activism,” Radical History Review n. 100 (winter 2008): pp. 11-37.

p. 173 – “Gay activists also started a wide range of projects to draw attention to the prisoners’ plight, including publicizing brutal prison conditions, lobbying legal counsel, and [p.174] organizing pen pal outreach…. Some of the interactions between prisoners and activists became – for both – transformational. Both of Boston’s radical gay publications, Fag Rag and Gay Community News, ran free ads for prisoners and helped to run a prisoner book project.”

p.174 – Duberman posits a connection between the “politics of social control, control of bodies, and even control of desires” and the government’s enactment of mass incarceration. And he criticizes the national LGBT organizations for ignoring criminal justice reform but instead “pledging allegiance to the institutions of an unjust social order.”

p.175 – He suggests that homophobia is alive and well in America today, even among ‘enlightened’ liberals, in that it considers “the ‘sadness’ of lives that aren’t centered on family life and child-rearing. Being gay, in this commonly held view, is like being single – that is, second-rate, incomplete, not adult. Such lives are seen as stunted, abnormal, disfigured.”

p. 206 – “When the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 decriminalized sodomy, it did so only for consenting adults in private. Left unmentioned – and still criminalized – are those multitudes whose sexual lives do not match up with middle-class notions of morality, who do not regard matrimony, the child-rearing couple, monogamy, and the picket fence as the signposts not only of contented bliss but of mental health. For both gay and straight minorities whose sexual habits fall outside prescribed parameters – including teenagers below the age of sixteen who make love together, polyamorists, sex workers, practitioners of S-M, public sex, and open marriages – the sex offender registry, not the welcome mat, shadows their doorstep. In other words, the status of a wide range of sexual behaviors that do not fit the approved license that Lawrence v. Texas handed out to ‘consenting adults in private’ remains, in essence, unprotected – outside the law. And this is not theoretical. In some states the number of inmates incarcerated for ‘sexual offences’ is as high as 30%.”

Cites: Scott De Orio, “The Invention of Bad Gay Sex: Texas and the Creation of a Criminal Underclass of Gay People,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26 n. 1 (January 2017).

David Cole, “The Truth about Our Prison Crisis,” New York Review of Books (June 22, 2017) review of John F. Pfaff, Locked In (Basic Books 2017) and James Forman, Locking Up Our Own (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2017).

Regina Kunzel, “Lessons in Being Gay: Queer Encounters in Gay and Lesbian Prison Activism,” Radical History Review n. 100 (winter 2008): 11-37.


ECONOMIC INJUSTICE

p. 60 – In the late 19th century, there was more economic mobility in the United

States than in Europe, but by the late 20th century there was more mobility in Europe. “Unfortunately, the assumption that America offers more of a chance for people born into the lower class to rise has continued to hold sway while the reality has shifted. Today, 70% of people born into the bottom quintile in the United States never make it into the middle class. Yet the sloganeering about upward mobility continues, made more offensive still by the wage stagnation of recent decades and the resulting decline in the average American’s standard of living. [p. 61] As Michael Harrington wrote back in 1962 in The Other America the primary reason most people remain poor is that ‘they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents’ – into families that faced built-in obstacles to advancement based on race, class, and gender. Those are the real forces that determine the nature of your journey through life.”

p. 179 – “Since the depths of the economic meltdown of 2008, the top 1% of Americans have gained 91% of the nation’s growth in income…. The combined wealth of the country’s four hundred richest Americans is greater than the bottom 61% of the population…. Some 43 million people in the United States – 13.5% of the population – are living in poverty…. A child growing up in poverty has a greatly reduced chance of getting a good education, a healthy diet, decent housing, a secure job, or the chance to save money for emergencies and retirement. Nor is the much-touted mobility of the American way a reality; we rank among the lowest among wealthy nations in the opportunities we offer for upward mobility. Oxfam reported in 2017 that just eight men, six of them Americans, now own the same amount of wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population – meaning more than 3.6 billion people.”

p. 181 – “By 2004, among 31 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked 25th in the overall security of its citizens.”

p. 182 – In the 1950s, when Americans were prospering, tax rates on the rich went as high as 90% (and inheritance taxes reached 80%). Since 1980, due to governmental policies favoring the rich, the unregulated financial sector steadily widened the gap between rich and poor. Today only half of Americans in their thirties earn more than their parents did at that age – though the real economy has doubled in size since 1980.

p.183 – “The share of total income that goes to the bottom half of the population has shrunk from 20% in 1980 to 12.5% in 2014. Concurrently, seven out of every ten dollars goes to the top tenth of the income scale, and the earnings of the top 1% have doubled since 1980. Put in dollars and cents, by 2014, the average income of half of American adults was around $16,000, while members of the top 1% brought home on average $1,304,800 – or eight times as much…. The tax code is so full of loopholes that the rich line their pockets – and avoid taxes – with ease (the wealthiest four hundred American taxpayers, each with annual income over $100 million, have of late been paying a federal tax rate – thanks to deductions that include such items as the cost of buying a private plane – of 16 to 22%).”

p. 184 – “In 2017 the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its annual report on hunger and food insecurity in the United States. Its conclusions are beyond shocking. The report classifies 41 million Americans as ‘food insecure,’ a figure that includes 13 million children who go to bed at night hungry – this at a time when the stock market has soared to unprecedented heights and the net worth of each of the four hundred wealthiest Americans rose by roughly $2.5 million.”

News and Resources

  • Canadian and US gay scholars win 2020 Warren Johansson Prize for anthology about sex on the Internet – The Foundation is pleased to announce Thomas Waugh (Concordia University, emeritus) and Brandon Arroyo (City University of New York, media studies) as the Warren Johansson Prize’s inaugural recipients for the anthology they edited, I Confess! Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age (McGill Queens University Press, 2019). READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Chicago writer Yasmin Nair to receive 2020 Charley Shively Prize for Gay Liberation – Over three decades, Chicago-based independent scholar, journalist, and activist Yasmin Nair has produced a body of queer critique unique in its wide compass, analytical clarity, resistance to cant, and Menckenian wit. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Transgender Wars and the Minor Child – The U.S. and other Anglophone countries have recently seen an exponential increase in young persons and their families pursuing professional therapy to prepare children as young as 12 for sex reassignment through puberty-blocking drugs, hormones, and in some cases even surgery. Credible scientific authorities have sharply varied opinions as to the wisdom of these radical approaches to treating children who present as gender dysphoric, but the full range of informed opinion and evidence is increasingly suppressed by ideological zealotry. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Guest Editorials – The Foundation is happy to post guest opinion pieces or reviews of notable books on topics of sexual diversity, rights, law, and history written by qualified scholars, activists, or those who have had contact with the criminal justice system. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Voluntary Sexual Relations Among Prisoners – Skewing male and young, and cut off from relationships and sexual outlets outside, prisoners frequently engage each other in sexual activity. In the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, voluntary sexual relationships are officially forbidden, with those caught often facing severe discipline. But prison administrators also sometimes respond with varying degrees of realism about sex among prisoners. What are the alternatives to prohibition? The articles and anecdotes here discuss the issues involved and offer data on this hard-to-assess and variable phenomenon. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Prison Sex & Prison Rape – A literature review, covering consensual sex, sexual victimization, conjugal visitation, and more! READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Do Illegal Images Encourage Child Molestation? – Mere possession of child pornography (which includes images to fully sexually mature adolescents) is one of the most rapidly growing offenses prosecuted in the U.S. federal system, earning those convicted an average sentence of 12.5 years (according to Department of Justice statistics). Often, the images in question are old and feature mere nudity, little different from what is found in naturist literature and legitimate art photography. In this brief, a well-known criminologist and expert witness reviews the most recent scholarship on the question, and concludes that there is no credible link between viewing such images and committing hands-on offenses against minors. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Criminalization of sex workers – or their clients – both violates individual rights and prevents prostitutes and other sex workers from the regulation that has been shown to keep the "oldest profession" safe and offering a living wage. The equation of sex work with "human trafficking" – a concept heavily promoted by Western governments and NGOs but little analyzed – serves to strip sex workers of any volition and presents them as pure victims. The result in recent years has been an intensified regime of surveillance of migrants, travelers generally, sex workers, and customers – as well as large upticks in punishments in the U.S. for completely consensual activities. Sex workers and their allies around the world are organizing to fight for reasonable regulation and legal protection. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Transgender people face police abuse – While trans issues in the West are prominent in popular consciousness like never before, and legal barriers to fair treatment are tending to fall, police harassment and disregard, together with high levels of criminal victimization, continue. These articles offer an overview. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Over-the-counter contraception & youth rights – Access to contraception is a fundamental aspect of young persons' ability to make their own sexual choices. The recent articles discussed here present the scope of the problem of inaccessibility of female contraception in the U.S., E.U., and beyond, and as well, the shifting political debates and medical developments touching on the issue. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Battles over sex-ed – Research shows that giving young people the knowledge and tools to make informed decisions about sexuality leads to better choices, reducing unwanted pregnancies and risk of disease, while opening up space for vital discussions about feelings, relationships, and the range of human sexual responses. With a bias toward abstinence-ed in the U.S., the benefits of sex-ed often are not realized, and GLBT youth are often left out of the picture. The articles here offer an overview. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Mass incarceration – The U.S. represents 4.4% of the world population, but 22% of its prisoners. Unjust sentences for victimless or merely statutory offenses are a key part of the problem, together with racism and moralism about drugs and sex. Inmates face high levels of physical and sexual assault, and targets are often transgender people and others with disparaged sexual identities. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Fighting civil commitment – Some 7,000 individuals languish in locked facilities in the U.S. because of Kafka-esque statutes allowing indefinite detention (sex offense civil commitment) when the government has nothing more than a hunch you might in the future do something wrong of a sexual nature. Only a very small number have ever been released, even though the earliest of these facilities have existed as long as 28 years. In at least some states, more have died than have been released. In order to detain an individual for as much as the rest of their lives, the state need not prove any mental illness, only a potentially undefined mental "disorder" or a completely limitless, undefined "mental abnormality." Those who are civilly committed are, according to the Supreme Court, not being "punished," though these detention centers are usually no more than prisons, both in architecture and secured perimeters, and also in operating methods and restrictions and requirements of those confined. In a remarkable series of newsletters, The Legal Pad, a civilly-committed former attorney looks at the legal and social consequences of America's growing extra-legal gulag system. READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Sexual minorities face more violence in prison – Incarceration tends to intensify forms of inequality and injustice prevalent in society. So it's no surprise that sexual and gender minorities often face higher rates of violence and maltreatment in jails and prisons. What's known and how are prisoners and allies taking action? READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Fears about young people's sexuality hinder HPV vaccination efforts – HPV vaccine protects against cancers caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) infection – a common virus. About one in four people in the U.S. is infected, and some 14 million new infections every year. Encouraging vaccinations among young people is a public health priority, and over time could prevent more than 30,000 U.S. cancer cases a year. But vaccination campaigns face serious resistance and vaccination rates are lower than they should be. What's the problem? READ MORE HERE ...
 
  • Book reviews and commentary – What University of Michigan gay scholar David Halperin calls the “War on Sex” is generating more and more critical analysis. READ MORE HERE...
 
  • Learning from History: Lessons for activism today – The GLBT movement has been one of the most successful social movements in the West in recent generations. Yet the struggle to fight sexual injustices and hysterias – now in new guises – seems greater than ever. READ MORE HERE ...

William A. Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies •  1421 Park Ave., Suite 100 • Chico, California 95928 USA • +1-530-715-5125

copyright 2020 William A. Percy Foundation