Sexual Identities, Queer Politics

By Mark Blasius

In this collection, political and public policy analysts explore the social concerns of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered--what has come to be known as "lgbt" or "queer" politics. Compared to the humanities and to other social sciences, political science has been slow to address this phenomenon. Issues ranging from housing to adoption to laws on sodomy, however, have increasingly raised important political questions about the rights and status of sexual minorities, particularly within liberal democracies such as the United States, and also on an international level. This anthology offers the first comprehensive overview of the study of lgbt politics in political science across the discipline's main subfields and methodologies, and it spotlights lgbt movements in several regions around the world. Focusing on the politics of sexuality with regard to the politics of knowledge, the book presents a discussion of power that will interest all political scientists and others concerned with minority rights and gender as well as with transformation in the relations between public and private.


The articles cover such topics as lgbt power in urban politics, the impact of public opinion on lgbt life, means of effecting legal and political change in the United States, and international differences in lgbt political activism. The authors represent a new cadre of political scientists who are creating an interdisciplinary domain of research that is informed by and in turn generates political activism. They are Dennis Altman, M. V. Lee Badgett, Robert W. Bailey, Mark Blasius, Cathy J. Cohen, Timothy E. Cook, Paisley Currah, Juanita Díaz-Cotto, Jan-Willem Duyvendak, Leonard Harris, Bevin Hartnett, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, David Rayside, Rebecca Mae Salokar, and Alan S. Yang.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691225449

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

SEXUAL IDENTITIES, QUEER POLITICS, AND THE STATUS OF KNOWLEDGE

Mark Blasius

THE PAPERS collected here are a cross-section of contemporary political science devoted to the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (hereafter LGBT) political phenomena. Most of the papers were first delivered at an international conference of academic and community intellectuals, elected officials, policymakers, and community-based activists organized by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) of the City of University of New York, February 8–9, 1996. Some of these were subsequently published as a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1997, for which I served as guest editor. Other papers were added to the preexisting collection to round it out by subdiscipline of political science and region of the world represented. Although it is by no means exhaustive of the theoretical and methodological breadth of LGBT studies or in political science (nor of regions of the world—scholarly political studies of the Islamic world, China, Eastern Europe, and the Indian subcontinent could not be found, and one commissioned on South Africa was, unfortunately, never completed), this collection will, I hope, provide a starting point for students, researchers, policymakers, and activists to participate in this emergent discourse. LGBT political studies have already had an effect in refocusing the perennial concerns of the discipline and suggesting new ones, in creating a bridge between political science and other social science and humanities disciplines, and in providing intellectual resources for the making of public policy while originating in the social movement’s critique of existing public policy and the social relations that undergird it.

In this brief introduction I would like to orient the reader in two ways. First, I will present an interpretation of the development of studies of LGBT phenomena and their effects on the discipline of political science in its theoretical, conceptual, and methodological substance, in its pedagogy and curriculum, and in the social relations that make up the discipline. These latter relations are often termed collegiality but they also include access to employment and consequent exercise of professional authority, reflecting the broader social problem of homophobic prejudice and discrimination. As such, any discussion of the emergence of LGBT studies in political science involves analysis of the politics of knowledge and expertise. Second, I will provide a schematic guide to how each of the papers exemplifies a focus that can inform our understanding of politics and the relationship between knowledge and politics, regardless of subdiscipline or methodological predilection. I mention as a caveat that I will base my interpretation primarily on the development of LGBT studies within North American political science; its development in other regional and national contexts, though it can be inferred somewhat from the writings included here, awaits future anthologizing.

Political science has been a bit of a latecomer to studies of LGBT phenomena, especially as compared with the humanities, but also as compared with other social sciences. Outside the academy, LGBT-oriented studies have flourished for at least a century, in an effort to influence the professionally organized production, transmission, and use of knowledge to authorize the exercise of governmental, as well as nongovernmental, power through expertise.¹ However, these studies began to enter the academy more assertively from the 1960s onward in correlation with the emergence of contemporary lesbian and gay movements and a public discourse about them, and about sexuality more generally. (Some of the work here uses the more expansive rubric sexual minorities to refer to collective political actors, and other work uses the more recent appellations lesbigay (lesbian, bisexual, and gay), or queer as an umbrella term—inclusive of bisexual, transgender, and heterosexually identified supporters—or to signify methodological refinement within lesbian and gay studies, or even to emphasize liberationist over assimilationist political ideology. (See the discussion of ideology especially in chapters 8 and 11.) Indeed, the title of this book is meant to indicate the coalescence of sexual identity- and in a different but related way, gender identity-) based activism around an analytical framework suited to the politics of sexuality. The concept of queer politics is used here with qualification to avoid homogenizing the differences and specificity of the political goals of each of these identity-derived movements, hence Sexual Identities, Queer Politics. This introduction highlights the role of a politics of knowledge in the relationship between LGBT (now sometimes written a LGBTST, the TS indieating two-spirit gender and sexual identities that exist in indigenous and non-Western cultures) and queer theory and politics. Since there is still controversy surrounding this relationship, following the usage of the CLAGS conference, community-based organizations, and a number of the authors in this volume, in this introduction I will use the nomenclature LGBT and from here onward, LGBT/queer where it seems appropriate, even in the absence of work devoted, in particular, to bisexual specificity. One projected paper on the role bisexuals played in the politics of AIDS did not, in the end, materialize, and the absence of such work in political science generally suggests that which knowledge is getting produced, and which knowledge is not, is itself an issue for further political analysis.² The growth of contemporary academic lesbian and gay studies has been faster in literary and cultural studies, and although it was spearheaded in the social sciences with psychology’s effort to depathologize homosexuality,³ this progress was far from continuous or universal across institutional contexts even in literary and cultural studies, not to mention most other social and natural science disciplines.⁴ The relationship between the production of knowledge about lesbians and gays and this knowledge’s proximity to the exercise of power through expertise needs much more research. In such research, a comparison with the reception of feminist scholarship in the academy, as well as its relation to feminist activism, should be central.

During the 1970s through the middle of the 1980s, published studies of lesbian and gay politics residing within the disciplinary tradition of political science, or even those presented at professional conferences, were few and far between.⁵ These latter contributions appear to have occurred first with the founding of the Gay Academic Union in New York City during the early 1970s by academicians rooted in the political organizations that burgeoned after the Stonewall riots of 1969. Paper presentations appeared sporadically at annual meetings of the American Political Science Association (APSA) as singular papers subsumed on panels devoted to such topics as interest groups, feminist theory, or civil rights and liberties.(Even at the time of this writing, only one LGBT-specific piece, a review essay about some recent empirical research, has been published in the American Political Science Review—reflecting the degree of institutionalized knowledge after almost thirty years of academic engagement.) Corresponding to the paper presentations, there were occasional and usually fairly secretive meetings of lesbian and gay political scientists at these APSA meetings, primarily to socialize and provide shelter within an otherwise chilly climate at the meetings—reflecting attitudes about homosexuality within the profession as a whole, and consequent fear among lesbian and gay political scientists. It appears in retrospect that the political urgency of the AIDS epidemic and the more public homophobia it occasioned paved the way for a small group at the APSA meeting of 1988 to organize the Gay and Lesbian Caucus for Political Science. This was noteworthy not only because it was an aboveground meeting (at an assigned room, widely publicized in advance, at the conference site) but also because it was committed both to the creation of an affiliated group of the APSA led by cochairs (beginning with Professor Sarah Slavin and myself) who would organize panels devoted to lesbian and gay political studies for the following annual meeting and on a continuing annual basis, and to addressing other professional concerns of lesbian and gay political scientists. Since that time, the LGBT presence has increased to include a standing Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Profession of the APSA (established in 1992), active recruitment of LGBT research into preexisting topical sections of the association, debates about discrimination, inclusion with equal status into professional life, and curricular reform at APSA governing council meetings, (albeit slight) publication in its professional journals, and out lesbian and gay members on many of the other APSA standing committees as well as on the council and among the officers and administration of the association.

All of these gains are in direct parallel with (perhaps as a consequence of) LGBT struggles in the real world of politics, in addition to professional consciousness-raising about homophobia in the context of the AIDS epidemic, mentioned above. Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of sodomy laws targeting homosexuals, motivated lesbian and gay political scientists in a successful effort to make the legal status of lesbians and gays in a particular municipality a consideration in the siting of APSA annual meetings. The struggle to pass federal, state, and local nondiscrimination statutes had its professional parallel in efforts of political scientists to fight discrimination in their workplaces through authoritative APSA-sponsored research and publication on the status of lesbians and gays within them. There has also been a parallel between struggles to include lesbian and gay issues in elementary and secondary school curricula with inclusion of the same in political science curricula and textbooks. The occupational and legal recognition of same-sex relationships within society was reflected in the recognition of domestic partnerships in APSA benefits programs and recommendation of the same to all employers of political scientists. In all of these cases, sociopolitical struggles were reflected in professional life through APSA-sponsored research, which then led to adoption of policies not only to counter homophobic prejudice and discrimination but also to include policies of affirmative action toward sexual minorities within the political science profession that could then be refracted back to the knowledge produced and decisions made by and effecting political scientists. Finally, and significantly for the relation between knowledge and practical politics, each annual meeting has come to sponsor a panel where local LGBT/queer activists could discuss issues and strategies—and the need for new knowledge produced by political scientists—and has provided an opportunity for the (U.S.) National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute to recruit political scientists to work with it think-tank style. This has become increasingly important for LGBT/queer activists as well as for elected officials, policymakers, and jurists.

One of the results of the discourse on the political that LGBT/queer studies has instigated is a refocusing of the sights of political science more generally. LGBT scholarship in political science, perhaps as distinct from that in other social sciences, has been treated suspiciously from its beginnings as not being disinterested and as being political advocacy, not scholarship or science. Yet, it has not mattered who is doing research on lesbian and gay politics, as long as it is infomed by the methodology of lesbian and gay studies (which in turn is a refinement of extant methodologies in empirical, comparative, historical, and normative political research); this is attested by the contributions of heterosexually identified political scientists to this volume, recalling the example of psychologist Evelyn Hooker’s renowned 1960s study of healthy gay men that helped removal of the illness nomenclature within mental health professions in the United States. In addition to methodological advances, there are important theoretical advances when sexuality is made an object of political analysis.

Viewed through the lens of liberalism, sexuality has usually been conceived beyond the purview of state action in a domain of privacy. However, LGBT/queer studies’ focus on the politics of sexuality has demonstrated how sexual relations are one dimension through which power relations operate—power being political science’s subject matter—and, as such, a dimension that implicates both practical concerns of the public interest supposedly embodied in the state and the analytical concerns vested in political science, which has traditionally also focused on power relations in civil society.(See chapter 14, Badgett’s essay, for studies on how power relations constitutive of heterosexism operate within the economy.)This situation is in some respects parallel to how feminism earlier had to explicate gender as an object for political analysis—that is, as a construct of power relations that instantiate inequality in societies, both present and past. Indeed, other concepts from feminist analysis, such as care and the distinction between formal role equity and substantive role change have already and will continually reshape the boundaries between public and private that can advance analysis of lesbian and gay deprivation of status.⁶ Through this challenge to the limits of liberal conceptions of the political, LGBT/queer political studies have expanded what politics is conceived to be both for liberal theory and for the discipline of political science.

At the very least, for example, this expansion may include critique of how the liberal tradition itself has reflected majoritarian tyranny that, through violence or more subtle coercion, constructs the closet for homosexuals and bisexuals, or a life of passing that has led not only to the social invisibility, but to the obliteration of minorities—sexual and otherwise—thereby disallowing entire domains of human aspiration and their cultural manifestation. On the other hand, politicization of the kind of which coming out is exemplary—in a sense, speaking truth to power_can render a historically specific hard shell of the liberal self, fundamental values (e.g., what is family—as relationships of care—and how should its forms be socially recognized and supported by public policies?), and individual and collective political interest that derives from such values, unstable and amenable to transformation. Further, LGBT/queer studies helps us in reconceiving the public and the private as not intrinsically fixed but as historically constructed in forms of regulation that do not simply repress sexuality (whether in legal prohibition or in the U.S. Congress’s de-funding of a massive survey about sexuality so that scientific knowledge about sexual practices could not even be produced, much less disseminated) but regulative techniques that also shape sexual practices (as in the battle over the content of AIDS education and those invoking recognition of sexual health generally as a public good). Viewing the public and the private as constructed this way, rather than either essentializing or obliterating the distinction between them, can render their distinction—and liberal theory—more reflective of contemporary political realities, and thus enable more informed discussion about the desirability and limits of governmental power. Finally, students of LGBT/queer politics, assisted by the feminist tradition of theorizing the limitations of individual rights in structural economic and social oppression,⁷ have conceptualized (nonprocreative) sexuality as a source of personal identity—for the intelligibility of the self (its specificity, its freedom, its subjection), with implications for individual and even group-based conceptions of rights—that informs participation in politics. This must thus be included in any formulation of social justice, as has already been recognized in the right to sexuality or sexual self-determination as sexual rights in international human rights discourse (see chapter 5).

Although I am focusing here on the dominant intellectual tradition in U.S. political science—liberalism—other intellectual traditions are equally if not more open to criticism. Conservative natural law tradition, especially as it informs right-wing religious movements to suppress homosexuals and nonprocreative sexual expression, must obviously be pushed much further by critical LGBT/queer activists and those working to change the doctrines of religion and heterosexist, patriarchal political ideologies around the world.⁸ For example, British commentator on U.S. politics Andrew Sullivan, in countering knowledge about homosexuality grounded in natural and religious law (but regrounding it in natural science) proposes toleration through equal rights to assimilate into traditional social institutions such as military organizations, the Catholic Church (albeit as a sinner according to its doctrine), and the monogamous family.⁹ On the other side, many perspectives on radical social change or revolution focus on a hierarchy of oppressions, with sexuality near the bottom, or the transcendence of homosexuality in the postrevolutionary state of affairs. Even some multiculturalist and postcolonial thought has done this (where homosexuality is seen as a disease white Westem males have transmitted to colonized males), as have some Marxist perspectives on the primacy of economic exploitation, and some radical feminist perspectives that view homosexuality as epiphenomenal to gender (pointing toward the disappearance of exclusive homosexuality as a consequence of the abolition of gender).¹⁰ Theoretical reconsideration of dominant fomulations of the political, conceptual clarification reflecting the politics of sexuality, and methodological refinement resulting from this that questions both a studied neutrality in political science and the ethics of the intellectual within an ongoing political controversy together challenge political scientists to rethink and retool in the light of studies on LGBT/queer politics.

Nevertheless, it is still possible for opponents of LGBT/queer studies to deny not only those arguments, but the legitimacy of raising these questions at all. Thus, while LGBT/queer studies are viewed as partisanship by its opponents, these same opponents claim as a matter of academic freedom what to pursue research upon and profess in the sanctity of one’s classroom. This position argues as though a teacher’s professional development (or a student’s education) excludes openness to new knowledge about human sexuality in order to protect their preconceived opinions about it; the position was taken to its absurd inverse extreme in the proposition—actually put forth at an APSA council meeting in opposition to the establishment of a committee on the status of lesbians and gays in the profession—that such a committee would itself out all LGBT political scientists and force them to do research on LGBT/queer politics!¹¹ In the face of views such as this, LGBT political seientists have made the delicate balance between their professional commitments and personal identities exemplary for their pedagogy, and have—through the vehicles of professional organizations and their meetings—cataloged how research on LGBT/queer politics can supplement the existing research interests of political scientists and contribute to the political science curriculum.

This effort of curricular reform needs to be contextualized. A 1995 survey conducted by the APSA Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Profession on the content of introductory U.S. government textbooks found that, after twenty-six years of institutional and extra-institutional activism (counting only that which was post-Stonewall and within established institutions of higher education), lesbian and gay politics was given no treatment in almost all of these textbooks except for an occasional passing reference. A 1994 anonymous survey of political science department chairs by the same committee found that fewer than one-third of them thought being lesbian or gay-identified was acceptable at their institutions, even though (only) slightly more than half of this cohort thought including gay/lesbian topics in a course was acceptable there.¹² In the face of these findings (and even more unsettling ones on collegiality, as we shall see), and the fact that there are likely LGBT/queer students in most political science classrooms (even though their presence there may not be as obvious as a student’s racial or cultural ancestry, gender, or other social categories already recognized as relevant for political analysis), lesbian and gay political scientists have worked within, their own academic, professional, and research institutions to infuse the politics of sexuality into the curriculum and expand the research horizons of the professors of this curriculum.¹³ The contributions to this volume are exemplary of political scientists focusing perennial research topics through the prism of LGBT/queer politics, staking out new ground for political research, and, through curricular reform, opening up new avenues for the relationship among personal experience, social movements, and students’ understanding of how social change takes place. In any case, these studies create innovative dimensions for the teaching and learning of political science.

The phrase we are everywhere has been a slogan, albeit one grounded in cultural and historical reality, for contemporary lesbian and gay politics. The papers collected here that represent a comparative approach to political analysis attest to this as well. In general, such analysis can compare how the various ways that cultures structure sexuality will condition whether and how sexuality will become a political issue, and who the principal actors articulating a politics of sexuality within the context of its political culture will be. The emergence of a distinctive lesbian and gay politics happened first and is the most developed in the countries of North America and Europe. David Rayside, comparing Canada, the United States, and Britain, refracts their respective governmental institutions, the dynamics and efforts of political parties—as well as those of interest groups—to control or influence such institutions, and electoral and other forms of political leadership through the prism of what he terms sexual minority activism. In doing so, Rayside weaves together the many threads of his published book-length study on this topic.¹⁴ Jan-Willem Duyvendak, in comparing France and the Netherlands (that has one of the most established—defined historically and through access to the government—European lesbian and gay movements) on the conditions for homosexual issues to become political ones, concludes with striking insights about how to interpret political culture, generally, derived from these two case studies. Rayside’s and Duyvendak’s essays—one structural, one cultural—are exemplary of the kind of political knowledge that needs to be produced both to develop comparative political science and to enable LGBT/queer activists to work together across borders as well as to understand their own national situations better through comparison. (To be sure, both essays rely on the role of activists and on community discourses to develop their insights in the first place.) In the work of Juanita Díaz-Cotto we see how lesbian issues coalesced, conflictually and collaboratively within feminist movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, and their relationship both to the (only sometimes, sexually) progressive movements of the left and in the context of right-wing and state-sponsored terrorism. As distinct from the civic ideologies of Europe and North America, these lesbianfeminist movements have to rely much more on religious and national liberationist traditions for constructing their own identities to engage in a politics of sexuality—in formulating issues as well as in turning them into demands on the political systems of their respective countries. From the perspective of the politics of knowledge, something very interesting happened where the level of knowledge was very low with people denying that lesbians could even exist but where, through a series of famous feminist conferences or encuentros, huge curious and well-intentioned audiences learned, and the status of lesbians began to change.

An analytical bridge between the comparative study of politics and international relations can be, for example, the ways in which local cultures maintain or cede their autonomous formations through a state that acts in a world of other states, and through the interaction between cosmopolitan and national cultural values that occurs in the context of contemporary forces toward globalization. Australian political scientist Dennis Altman writes from the interface between political sociology and personal experience to show how the identities of being gay and lesbian, though inventions of modern Western cultures, have had great usefulness for organizing politically around the interrelationship of gender and sexuality in the western Pacific rim. Such organizing draws upon rich indigenous traditions of homoerotic love, is inspired by and inspires transnational networks that inform local, regional, and international politics, and is producing a significant postcolonial perspective on the relation between the personal and the political in its simultaneous resistance and co-optation of globalization. The battle between cosmopolitan gay identities and local critiques and adaptations of them that Altman chronicles (he has been a principal commentator on the relation between the local and global politics of AIDS) has also been reflected in international forums such as the UN Conferences on Population and Development at Cairo in 1994 and on Women at Beijing in 1995. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, a MacArthur Fellow recognized for her leadership in cross-cultural scholarship on reproductive freedom, analyzes here the interaction between a universalist and cultural relativist politics of sexuality through her pathbreaking genealogy of sexual rights as it has emerged in international human rights discourse. Both she and Altman demonstrate how the politics of sexuality, crystallized in LGBT (but notably not queer in this context) organizing (but also around AIDS), raises important issues for the study of international collaboration, international political economy, international law and jurisprudence, and transnational activism in the future.

Despite the empirical orientation of much of political science, political theory has provided a fertile medium for considering conceptual, historical, and methodological issues that arise out of LGBT/queer politics. My own contribution to this volume is an attempt to consider what is at stake in politically theorizing homosexuality today. Writing at the moment some participants in LGBT and AIDS activist movements were turning queer into a positive, not pejorative, term of political discourse, I analyzed the historical emergence of lesbian and gay political identity, how this results in an ethical stance toward politics in contemporary liberal democracies (what I term an ethos), and what the broader implications of lesbian and gay politics are for what we conceive politics to be. This paper inspired a critical exchange in Political Theory after its publication (as that journal’s first article on the subject), a portion of which, directly addressing the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the politics of knowledge, I have added to the conclusion of my chapter here. The original paper was subsequently translated into and published in Dutch and Japanese and contains a portion of the argument in my book (Blasius 1994, note 10). Paisley Currah’s contribution revises the rubric that I (and other lesbian and gay theorists) have employed by working through the practice of gender transitivity; her analysis draws on the political experience of the transgendered and the epistemological insights of recent queer theory. At the frontier of contemporary feminist political theory, she demonstrates the absurdities, but also the forms of oppression, that arise when judicial and legislative bodies attempt to codify the unstable relationship among sex, gender, and sexuality.

Queer theory arose in the academy in the early 1990s as a response to the post-AIDS politics of sexuality of an offshoot of the AIDS-activist group, ACT-UP, that called itself Queer Nation. It was influenced intellectually primarily by the postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault and was motivated to move beyond the immediate goal of ACT-UP to get (anti-AIDS) drugs into bodies. Queer Nation and queer theorists took every society’s structuring of sexuality as a starting point to criticize the binary opposition and consequent inequality between homosexuality and heterosexuality undergirding the economic, political, and cultural functions this social structuring of sexuality by heteronormativity performs. In this sense, queer theory is akin to the feminist imperative to move from analysis of male-female relationships in terms of role equity to role change I have already mentioned. But by tending toward a single-variable understanding of social change (even to the extent of viewing the fluidity of the distinctions among sex, gender, and sexuality through erotic desire as an independent variable) queer theory became immediately subjected to constructive but well-deserved criticism of which Cathy J. Cohen’s is one of the most significant examples. Her critique of the erasure of the dimensions of race and class in queer politics and the theorizing that arose from it also articulates a framework for conceiving social justice that draws on critical race theory, but has applications beyond the U.S. context. Social justice inclusive of sexuality can only be conceptualized or enacted from explicit recognition of the relationships between sexual oppression and the oppression of other disenfranchised groups and coalition with them on the basis of our intersecting identities of class, gender, age, sexual orientation, able- and desirable-) bodiedness, race, and ethnicity, among others. Any single-issue politics is not only elusive, but counterproductive in Cohen’s analysis—informed as it is by her published work on the politics of AIDS within communities of color in the United States. Cohen’s essay offers a clear example of the relationship between knowledge and politics, and how a politics of knowledge may be conceived within this relationship.

If queer theory’s emphasis on the fluidity of sex-, gender-, and sexuality-based identities is qualified by a caveat against queer-specific in the place of intersectional analysis and coalitional politics, politically theorizing homosexuality can lead us into a methodological muddle. For example, is there a lesbian and gay community as is often touted in political analysis and rhetoric, not to mention an LGBT/queer movement? How could the political phenomena we use these concepts to describe constitute a collective actor? A research population? A hypothetical voting bloc? Further, when the relationship between objective observer and research subject is problematized—as is particularly evident when research involves acknowledging one’s own multiple identities, how does this transformed relationship affect basic issues of epistemology in political analysis? Robert W. Bailey’s work addresses some of these issues on the borderlines among LGBT/queer studies, urban politics, political methodology and social theory, and U.S. political processes and government. His writing over the past ten years, of which the contribution here is a distillation, breaks new ground for our understanding of how to conceive LGBT or queer (or again, as Rayside puts it, sexual minority) identification as a variable in political research, how sexual identity informs political attitudes, whether and how these coalesce to effect public policy, and, on this basis, why we need to revise standard fomulations of the relationship among economic, social, demographic, and ideological variables in understanding urban politics in the United States.

One of the most obvious (because it has been strategically central) but nonetheless scarcely analyzed (by traditional political science) domains of U.S. politics is the relationship among courts, legislatures, and LGBT movements. A number of such public policy issues as civil rights laws, criminal justice, domestic partnership and other laws relating to marriage and family construction, funding for sexual health-related research, disease prevention, and care, and censorship have been or are, all on the political agenda at various stages in jurisdictions with very diverse political geographies. Rebecca Mae Salokar stakes out this terrain in a comprehensive and theoretically rich essay that contributes to our understanding of federalism and intergovernmental relations, constitutional law and jurisprudence, and state and local politics, implying greater understanding, as well, of practical strategies for LGBT populations and their advocates. Her analytical distinction between a social movement and interest groups can inform current debates about the extent to which a progressive social movement can be privatized and its consequences. Future empirical research, theory, and strategy might take up the question toward which she points in the closing pages of her paper. This concerns what the relative significance is of (1) shopping around among the states for the best legal forums as compared with the relationship between public and private law (resulting in the hole in the bottom of the bucket in states with sodomy statutes), and even family law; and (2) discovering other arenas for progressive political change from an LGBT and queer perspective, recognizing both the promise but also the limits of the logic of the law in litigating social change.

In a more cultural interpretation of U.S. politics, Timothy E. Cook and Bevin Hartnett revise conventional wisdom about the relationship between the media and social movements and expand upon Cook’s prior contribution to political science—conceiving the news media as a fourth branch of govemment. Their analysis of the news coverage of lesbian and gay issues in the United States during the 1970s opens up the field of political communication with new understandings—not only about stereotypical depictions of a minority group in the mass media and popular culture, but also about how these images reflect the degree and form of access to the media and other forms of political communication by gays and lesbians, and the consequences of differential access for any minority group’s political goals. Their approach—textual interpretation of the news media, analyzing presentation of the social debate about the status of gays and lesbians and relating this to intramovement debate about strategy and goals—is also a convincing example of political science’s role in analyzing what has come to be called the culture wars in the United States. These are, at least in part, wars over how the soul of U.S. democracy is more and more being specified through the production of knowledge about identity and diversity in the context of increasing cultural pluralism, how this knowledge is institutionalized in curricula, writing, and popular culture (including the news media), and the relationship of this to expertise in the making of public policy and the exercise of culturally inflected power in society.

Mention of the U.S. culture wars leads to a final group of essays, those directly concerned with the politics of knowledge from the perspective of sexual identity. Leonard Harris’s paper, written for this volume, analyzes the politics of both the historical cover-up of Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke’s homosexuality and contemporary efforts of LGBTs and queers to reclaim his biography and his social and political philosophy. Harris’s outing of Locke will undoubtedly be found controversial, is long overdue, but is ultimately about the politics of knowledge. This includes the conditions under which knowledge gets produced (both by Locke himself and by others invoking his knowledge and life), how knowledge gets used, and how the production and use of knowledge is dependent on changing, but distinctively political, circumstances, here arising from the growth of LGBT movements in coalition with those among African Americans.

Alan S. Yang’s essay considers whether the changing views of experts change the views of the public at large. He refutes some of our received wisdom about the top-down relationship between elites and masses in political opinion formation through his study of the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness as compared with the U.S. federal government’s 1993 decision to retain its ban against service by gays and lesbians in the military. While his conclusions may be interpreted ambivalently (what happens when there are dueling experts, a point raised in the next essay about the scientific claims of rightwing so-called experts on homosexuality), Yang points out that analyzing the politics of what counts as knowledge and how this comes about is indispensable if we are to understand how public policy happens and how LGBTs or other movements can change policies.

Following from this, a final area of political analysis that bridges all subfields of political science is what kind of knowledge is relevant to politics, who can supply it, and why knowledge of a particular phenomenon is claimed to be able to improve the social order. In other words, what is expertise and why has a politics of sexuality come to rely on it? while every author in this volume would probably have different answers to these questions, M. V. Lee Badgett, a professor of public policy as well as founder and executive director of a lesbian and gay think tank, addresses these issues in a historical and comparative ideological context. This type of discussion is crucial for LGBT and queer politics because the truth has perennially been constructed about sexuality (through natural law, scriptural interpretation, sociobiological science, etc.) and used to deny people basic human rights and dignity; indeed, a politics of knowledge is about the status of truth in relation to how power is exercised. With Badgett’s synoptic approach to this relationship between knowledge and politics, we come full circle, returning to the last of the questions posed at the outset of this introduction.

How do the social relations constituted by the discipline of political science reflect both what we conceive political knowledge to be, and how to get it, and what the relationship is between political science and the society in which we live? Recall that APSA survey on the status of lesbians and gays in the profession of political science. More than 80 percent of department chairs surveyed did not know of any lesbian or gay applicants for jobs in their departments (identified by research, advocacy, or self-identification) and an equal number did not know whether such identification would be considered an asset, liability, or neither. (Indeed, there was a seeming filteringout process, a striking decrease in the percentage of people who anonymously identified themselves on the general surveys of political scientist students and faculty as gay, lesbian, or bisexual from among undergraduates, to an almost statistically insignificant number self-identifying in the political science professoriate.) What are we to make of these findings for our collegial relations, our professed liberal equality, and our own role as guardians—at least on the intellectual and pedagogical levels_of such pluralist, egalitarian ideals?

Is this collegial situation solely a reflection of LGBT political scientists’ being closeted, or does it also reflect how interpersonal expectations coded as professional standards—of conduct, pedagogy, and research interest— not only coerce LGBT people into invisibility, but disallow research into the politics of sexuality, both of which have consequences for sexual choice and its implications for human happiness more generally in our society? For example, those same surveys also indicated a substantial number of gay and lesbian (as well as some heterosexual) political scientists who either have been discouraged from taking up research questions related to the politics of sexual orientation or refrain from such research for fear of not being taken seriously as scholars. A perspective from the sociology of knowledge would suggest that the tendency to subsume lesbian theory under feminist theory and the existence of more writing about LGBT politics by (white) gay men indicate the more precarious professional status of lesbians as both women and gay and that both lesbians and gay men of color must cope, as Leonard Harris’s analysis here suggests, with invisibilization within LGBT movements as well as by the discipline of political science to the extent the latter is dominated through prejudices exemplifying gender, sexual, and racial stratification.

Perhaps another angle from which to view an interconnection between the social relations of the discipline of political science and social relations in the larger society is through a comparison with the discipline of psychology. While the professional organization of U.S. political scientists (APSA) has maintained a position of neutrality with respect to public policy issues, the American Psychological Association (APA) has sanctioned the use of its name and has allocated association resources to employ psychological expertise for direct intervention into the political arena to ameliorate the status of lesbians and gays in U.S. society in order to counterbalance the many years psychology was used as a means of oppressing gays and lesbians, as the APA has articulated the reason for this policy. Ultimately, it is at least a matter of professional ethics¹⁵ with appropriate institutional support at levels of collegial relations, conditions of employment, and the norms articulated by national and international professional organizations to create a different climate for research and teaching about the politics of sexuality. And the climate within political science (although obviously reflecting) can then serve as a condition for more general social tolerance, and even egalitarian social justice, as is suggested by the writers in this collection. To be sure, the papers in this volume can be conceived only as keys to open the gate to this new ethos of professional life; it will only be through their use—in political science discourse and professional recognition, in advancing LGBT- and nonLGBT-specific research and methodology in the discipline, and in teaching—that the gate may be opened and we can bridge the gap between political knowledge and the better society we often profess to be the value of our pursuit of knowledge.

If, as I suggested earlier, we take some of our cues from the relationships among the feminist movement, feminist scholarship, its degree of its acceptance within the academy, and feminist knowledge’s infusion back into general social relations, we might gain insight into the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the politics of knowledge. Rather than conclude this introduction with a list of avenues for future research in LGBT political science, I will suggest that the paradigm shift in feminist political science from women and politics to gender politics has its parallel in what is happening now in the shift from the study of lesbian and gay (or LGBT) politics to studying the politics of sexuality, that queer evokes.¹⁶ Sexuality—indeed, the distinction among sex, gender, and sexuality, as well as the emergence of a new sexual ethic that has implications for morality and law—has become a part of our political universe, even if some of us want to disguise this fact with a historically misconceived and arbitrary distinction between public and private. This is attested to by social movements that force reconsideration of the knowledge we use in order to govern ourselves. So the essays in this book, while written in the genre of political science and philosophy, could only have been written but for the movements that enabled the knowledge to be produced, and that motivate the writer to engage in a dialogic relationship with movement participants. These LGBT/queers not only enabled the knowledge, but will use it, criticizing and reformulating it again, in order to affirm sexuality as a central component of the lives of individuals, of the relationships in which they are engaged, and of the collectivities through which they govern themselves as individual members and as a polity.

Notes

1. See the chronicle of this in We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997).

2. For an example of bisexual specificity in another discipline, sociology, see Paula Rust, Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1995). There have been no studies, to my knowledge of the political science literature, of bisexual politics except the selection by Stacy Young, Dichotomies and Displacement: Bisexuality in Queer Theory and Politics in Playing With Fire: Queer Theories, Queer Politics, ed. Shane Phelan (New York: Routledge, 1997), 51–74.

3. The classic study of the politics of homosexuality in the mental health professions is Ronald Bayer’s Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, orig. pub. NY: Basic Books, 1981); for, specifically, how psychology developed, there is a documentary film (available in VHS), Changing Our Mind: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker, by Richard Schmeichen, released in 1991 by Frameline, 346 9th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 (phone [phone]). No single work has traced the development of lesbian and gay (or queer) studies across the academic disciplines; however, some representative collections include the following. For literary and cultural studies: The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), and issues of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter of the Gay and Lesbian Caucus of the Modern Language Association, published by Duke University Press, Durham, NC, can serve to trace this development historically.In history: Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Dubeman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: New American Library, 1989). In economics: Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life, ed. Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed (New York: Routledge, 1997) has several essays that deal with the development of lesbian and gay studies in that discipline. In anthropology: Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists, ed. Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). In sociology: Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); and Gay and Lesbian Studies, ed. Henry L. Minton (Binghamton, NY: Haworth, 1992) provides an overview across disciplines on pedagogy and methodology, institutional reform, and cross-national analysis of the development of lesbian and gay studies. See also Blasius and Phelan and the citations of Lee Badgett’s essay in this volume for the earlier homophile studies and their predecessors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

4. See Toni A. H. McNaron, Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997) for a study of lesbian and gay academics with at least fifteen years of experience in their profession. Progress has been uneven and slow, despite the star system of relatively few contemporary out academics.

5. At the risk of exclusion through inclusion, based solely on my own knowledge I will list as exemplary Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (New York: Avon, 1973) and papers presented at American Political Science Association meetings by Kenneth Sherrill (1973), David Thomas (1984), and a presentation by Altman in the mid-1980s enabled by a protest by lesbian and gay political scientists because a gay male’s perspective had been denied from representation on a panel on the politics of AIDS. Lesbian political scientists, to the extent they felt safe in a very chilly professional climate even for women, engaged in scholarly exchange through the Women’s Caucus of the APSA during this period.

6. See Joan c. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially her analysis of the political implications of care in the context of AIDS at pp. 106-7, for a suggestive extension of this concept specifically to gay male politics; further extension to transgender, lesbian, and bisexual issues awaits analysis. See Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief Palley, Women and Public Policies: Reassessing Gender, rev. and expanded ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) for the latter reconceptualization of role; the timeworn sociological concept of the homosexual role first theorized by Mary McIntosh (see McIntosh, The Homosexual Role and Postscript: 'The Homosexual Role’ Revisited, in The Making of the Modem Homosexual, ed. Kenneth Plummer [London: Hutchinson, 1981]) might be a starting point for extension of this concept, for example from equity (assimilation) to change (what is called gay liberation).

7. See, for example, Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

8. Principal examples of this are Margaret Thatcher’s advisor Roger Scruton’s Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (New York: Free Press, 1986), and more recently Oxford professor John Finnis, Law, Morality, and 'Sexual Orientation,’ Notre Dame Law Review 69 (1994): 1049-76, who wrote a brief in support of the judicial voiding of Colorado’s law prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals.

9. See Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (New York: Knopf, 1995), although his thoughts on living as a gay Catholic are scattered across many of his other writings. Within the spectrum of activism, efforts to transfom doctrine on homosexuality are many within the Protestant denominations, Roman Catholicism, and Islamic and Hindu thought.

10. A critique of postcolonial thought on this basis may be found in Leela Gandhi, Postcolomal Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); contemporary critique of homophobia in the Marxist tradition is legion ranging from Marcuse to Foucault, but see the selections in Blasius and Phelan, We Are Everywhere in response to Cuba’s anti-homosexual revolutionary policy (406–12) and those by Hocquenghem (412–19) and Mieli (438–43); for critiques of heterosexism in feminism, see the analyses by Morgan, Nestle, Califia, and the transgendered Lesbians for Justice in We Are Everywhere as well as my critique of Catherine MacKinnon in Blasius, Gay and Lesbian Politics: Sexuality and the Emergence of a New Ethic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), chapter 2.

11. The author witnessed this at an APSA Council meeting in 1991, but the comment does not appear in the published minutes of that meeting.

12. Presentation and analysis of the data of surveys both of department chairs and individual political scientists has been published as APSA Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Profession, Report on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Political Science Profession, PS.: Political Science and Politics 28 (September 1995): 561–74. Kenneth Sherrill of Hunter College/CUNY possesses the raw data from the survey.

13. For example, the APSA committee has made regular presentations to the program committee for the APSA annual meeting to raise consciousness about the relevance of research on lesbian and gay politics to the established sections (subfields) of the discipline and has an ongoing project creating curricular guides for infusing LGBT issues into teaching a wide number of topics in political science. Similar intitiatives, including the holding of conferences for a multidisciplinary professional and activist audience (such as the one this reader represents), have been undertaken at my own university and many others, as well as through both general and LGBT-specific research institutions (see Badgett’s contribution to this volume).

14. I am not citing the related work of each author in this introduction. Readers might consult the bibliography of each essay, the author’s biography, or more general tools of bibliographic research to find them.

15. For a perspective on what professional ethics might entail, see the program of action drawn up by the APSA Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays in the Profession based on its survey findings, and adopted by the APSA Council in 1995: Working Towards an Inclusive Political Science: Recommendations for the American Political Science Association, available from APSA, 1527 New Hampshire Avenue N.W., Washington, D.c. 20036.

16. An example of this is the recent change in the Western Political Science Association’s (in the United States) renaming of its section on lesbian and gay politics to Politics and Sexuality. I view this not as merely becoming more inclusive, but as reflecting a transformation in epistemology for understanding what is political.

PART ONE

COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

ONE

THE STRUCTURING OF SEXUAL MINORITY ACTIVIST OPPORTUNITIES IN THE POLITICAL MAINSTREAM: BRITAIN, CANADA, AND THE UNITED STATES

David Rayside

THERE ARE SIGNS of political access, uneven and inconsistent, across the landscape of mainstream institutions. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals contest elections, and sometimes