Queering Queer

At the end of the eighties, with AIDS activism at its apex and the lesbian sex wars having fractured the superstructure of lesbianism, Queer politics rushed into the vacuum created by these social, political, and discursive crises. The avatar of this Queer moment was the short-lived but influential organization Queer Nation, which emerged out of ACT-UP New York as a sub-group dedicated to questioning and challenging the perceived homonormativity of mainstream LGBT organizations and bringing the activist techniques of ACT-UP to social change for lesbians and gay men.

A younger, politicized generation of lesbians and gay men took up a queer banner that in many reflected the values of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance of the immediate post-Stonewall period of the early 1970s. Arguing that LGBT organizations had become too oriented towards reform rather than revolution, Queer Nation in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and the organization OutRage! in the United Kingdom wanted to “queer” once again lesbian and gay identity, place it in opposition to heterodomination as well as homonormativity, and undermine gender, race, and class categories by “queering” them: that is, recast socio-cultural and political relations in a critical and revolutionary framework. We should understand homonormativity in this context to mean a reformist, commercially focused LGBT identity that mimicked heterosexual bourgeois attitudes of consumption, ennui, moral propriety, and material comfort.

The twin engines for this movement were AIDS activism and the political crisis of HIV, and the rise of 1980s identity politics that recapitulated sixties social movement ideas of marginal identities and subjective perspectives. Queer Nationalists argued for a dedicated and specific lesbian and gay identity (“Queer”) that was grounded in deep alienation from the heterodominant parent culture, an identity that was located in a sense of visceral difference and oppression, and that could form the basis for collective organizing.

Therefore, in some ways, Queer Nation and queer nationalism proved the truism “What’s old is new again,” through a resumption of the politics of alterity (alienated difference) that marked early contemporary LGBT organizing following Stonewall, grounded in LGBT difference from heterosexual culture. And while Adam is not a fan of Queer nationalism, the moment proved to be more important than style politics.

A personal recollection— I was in New York City when Queer Nation made its debut in early 1990, and the energy was palpable. The change, the shift, almost felt like emerging from a dark tunnel into the sunlight after the 1980s and AIDS and the sense of death that imbued gay male culture in particular: The Fear. By the end of 1990, I had moved to the other Gay mecca, San Francisco, where I was able to witness the development of an important center of Queer nationalism outside of New York. Again, the energy and critique were remarkable in the sense in which they tapped into the rage and frustration of many urban, intellectual lesbians and gay men in the shadow and grief of AIDS, and brought voice to our deep-seated feelings of anger. However, very quickly, the proclamations became self-righteous and the markers somewhat disabused: the ubiquitous “rage,” the leather jackets plastered with the trademark neon stickers of Queer Nation, the same stickers covering advertisements and telephone poles in the Castro and station maps in the subway: a uniform and stance as unrelenting and suffocating as any other. It is not that Queer Nation and queer nationalism, with its contempt for the bourgeoisification of LGBT organizing and homonormativity, did not strike a chord. It’s that, on some level, it was not polyvocal. It could not figure out as an organization and a movement to speak in many cadences. Like the movements it sought to criticize, it too formed inside and outside boundaries very quickly, and anyone that appeared "normal" in any way, even the most banal, could not enter its precincts. In particular, its project to recover the word “Queer,” a word I had never been called personally (Faggot was much more common, from the lips of loved ones as well as the passing mouths of strangers), struck me, again perhaps personally, as idiosyncratic and archaic. Then again, after many years in the trenches of racial and sexual identity politics at Yale, maybe I myself was tired of the posturing and zeal, the self-aggrandizement of identity politics, and wanted to figure out a way to understand my own rage as well as live my life.

The demise of Queer nationalism speaks on one hand to my personal recollection, which perhaps could be construed as exhaustion plus skepticism, but also, as Adam notes, to the diversification of LGBT thought following the 1980s, a diversification rooted in the lesbian sex wars and the decimation and trauma of AIDS on gay men. As we shall see, the critical impulse of Queer nationalism contained both important critiques of heterodominant parent cultural norms, in particular the legitimization of violence against lesbians and gay men, as well as a much-needed focus on where and how dominant lesbian and gay cultures had fallen down, had not risen to the challenge of developing holistic strategies for lesbians and gay men in heterodominant culture.

Almost twenty years after the emergence of Queer nationalism, the term lives on in a somewhat weak version of its earlier self, normalized and consumed as the terms lesbian and gay before it. Yet, Queer nationalism reenergized the LGBT community at a moment when debates on marriage, HIV disease, childrearing and family, local and national politics, and civil rights, and the role of transgender people would become paramount. The tenets of Queer nationalism, therefore, represent in some critical way the didactic tensions between normalcy and outlaw culture that typify LGBT socio-political expressions since the end of World War Two.

As we have noted, however, we do not live in dyads, we live within them. The twin impulses of many LGBT people to be both outlaw and normal therefore determine both the particular fate of Queer nationalism as well as the important questions it raised for LGBT people following 1990 and continuing to today.