Building a Movement: US LGBT Activism from the Cold to the Culture Wars

This paper explores the history of US LGBT activism from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century. We will examine the US LGBT movement as it developed across five major phases, spanned diverse localities (gay metropoles, towns, rural spaces, …), operated on various scales (local, state, national, international, ...), mobilized by different means (artistic, print, electoral, legal, archival, ...), and focused on numerous issues (medical, electoral, political, religious, legal, gendered, racial, ...) in the pursuit of evolving political objectives. In seeking to understand the choices activists made as well as the constraints they faced, we will set their activities within wider political developments such as the Cold War, AIDS, or neoliberal culture wars that they helped transform. We will pay particular attention to the LGBT movement’s close interplay with other social movements (e.g. Black Freedom struggle, Women’s Liberation, and Disability Justice). We will place a further recurrent focus on how activists developed and mobilized historically situated ideas of LGBT identity, community, and liberation as a vital element of their political work.  

Whilst the paper will look at the US LGBT movement in particular, it will also aim to teach students general research skills related to the study of social movements. In our critical engagement with movement historiography, sources, and methodologies, we will investigate both what is particular about the study of the US LGBT movement as well as attend to what has been borrowed from or found parallel usage in the recovery of other social movements. Through the study of one particular movement, the paper will ultimately broach wider questions around the origins, development, and success of social movements - asking, for example, why and under what conditions individual acts of resistance broaden into collective resistance and movement building, how social movements have worked to forge and sustain collective power, what openings for and limitations of solidarity they have faced, and how to assess the failures and triumphs of past movements.