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I n t r o d u c t i o n On Sunday 11 October 1987, more than 200,000 protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., for a national march for lesbian and gay rights. The day began with the unveiling on the Mall of the AIDS memorial quilt. Containing 1,920 three foot by six foot panels made by the lovers, friends, and families of those lost to the epidemic, the quilt (which by 2010 had grown to more than 40,000 panels) was a powerful and moving tribute. One newspaper report noted that as the pieces were “unfurled and hooked together” the “early morning quiet” was “punctured” by the “sound of sobs” and the reading aloud of the names of those who had died. The march itself, which began at 1 p.m., was a festive and colorful affair: scores of gay couples exchanged vows during a mass wedding and the crowd was adorned with banners, placards, flags, and balloons. Throughout the day, lesbians and gay men were urged to demand with pride their rights as American citizens. John Bush, a long-time activist, told the crowd that “All men are created equal. And we have to stand up and say, ‘We’re gay and we’re here’,” while San Francisco supervisor Harry Britt recalled his slain predecessor Harvey Milk’s desire for “us to associate ourselves in a powerful way with the symbols of this country.” In his keynote speech Rev. Jesse Jackson explained that the marchers had gathered to “insist on equal protection under the law for every American .” With protesters singing “We Shall Overcome” and Jackson taking a high-profile role, comparisons with the civil rights movement were perhaps inevitable; certainly many demonstrators claimed inspiration from the August 1963 March on Washington.1 Two days later more than two thousand gay men and women gathered outside the Supreme Court to protest its controversial 1986 decision to uphold a Georgia sodomy law. At about 9 a.m. activists, “moving intermittently in groups of 15 to 30,” began to walk past the police barricades and toward the court, where 2 Introduction they sat “in circles on the plaza of the building” before being handcuffed and taken away. While most walked calmly to waiting buses, some had to be “dragged across the plaza.” When the demonstration ended at 2 p.m. more than 600 had been arrested, making it the “largest mass arrest at the Court since May Day in 1971, when 7,000 anti-war protesters were detained.”2 With its staging of colorful mass protest, deployment of civil disobedience, and recourse to the language of rights, the gay rights activism of October 1987 showed that the spirit of the 1960s was very much alive in Ronald Reagan’s America. Interviewed in Newsweek in the summer of 1970, Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter quipped that, were he to write a book chapter on the 1960s, he would entitle it “The Age of Rubbish.” Looking back a halfcentury later at some of the less appealing features of that decade—the countercultural excess, the revolutionary posturing, and the violence— one might be tempted to agree. Certainly many commentators and former radical activists struggled at times to identify any real achievements : after all, neither participatory democracy nor leftist revolution came to America.3 Two years after the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, and the uprisings in Paris and on the campus of Columbia University, historian and critic Christopher Lasch cast his eye over what he called the “wreckage of the sixties” and found himself “amazed at how little has been accomplished.” “Nothing,” he declared, “has changed.”4 As the New Left disintegrated in a haze of marijuana smoke and internecine squabbling, former Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby voiced his own sense of despair in the pages of Liberation magazine; his article was entitled “Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin.”5 Forty years later, whatever one’s views on the merits of the Age of Aquarius, it would be hard to argue that the Sixties were unimportant. During the last third of the twentieth century many progressives worked to preserve and extend the gains made during the 1960s, while conservatives often defined themselves in opposition to that decade’s liberal politics and challenges to traditional authority.6 When it comes to contemporary arguments around issues of minority rights and affirmative action, the desirability of welfare programs and “big government,” or cultural permissiveness and...

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