The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington (review)

In Dividends of Dissent, Amin Ghaziani uses archival and interview evidence to narrate the story of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizing in the United States for four national-level marches between 1979 and 2000. In the process, Ghaziani asserts that infighting is not destructive but generative and actually serves to concretize abstract cultural conversations of identity and strategy in a movement. In that sense, this is a book for those interested in social movements, cultural concretization, and conflict. And although Ghaziani is careful to clarify that he does not intend his book to be a generalist one on modern US LGBT history, it does provide a quite readable new empirical record of the first four lesbian and gay (and, later, bisexual and transgender) marches in the United States.

For those not interested in his theoretical discussions, Ghaziani suggests skipping the first and the last chapters of his book, so I begin this review by focusing on the body of the book. That body consists of eight chapters, ordered chronologically, which engagingly tell the story of how various LGBT movement participants worked to organize four different national marches on Washington. For each march, he first provides an overview chapter tracing the four dimensions (community consciousness, organizational development, threat, and political-cultural status) of the sociopolitical context leading up to the march. Next, he provides a more pointed chapter telling the story of concrete work done to pull together each march (often tracing that work meeting by meeting, debate by debate). The author drew on more than a thousand newspaper accounts, forty-four interviews with key players in each march, archival materials, and audio and video accounts of marches; readers will appreciate the depth and strength of Ghaziani’s research. Together these chapters narrate a comprehensive story of a social movement’s development, from beginning as a coalition-oriented, multi-issue, progressive, social justice movement in 1979 to becoming a single-issue, corporate-modeled, nationally organized, mainstream movement by 2000. As one might imagine, this process was fraught with infighting, but infighting that Ghaziani portrays as productive (for the most part).

Ghaziani begins by showing how organizers of the first march (1979), confronted with the challenge of conceiving themselves as part of a national movement, “aired dissent along the way” (43). Ghaziani explains how organizing was characterized by “infighting over whether to march, when to march, what to title it, how to organize it, how to construct its platform and who to invite as speakers” (66). To accommodate dissent while moving toward decision making, this first march utilized organizing strategies of having an interim steering committee start the organizing, participation of local lesbian and gay groups from across the country, use of human rights language and gender equity to articulate march purposes, and incorporation of advisory committees for groups experiencing “special oppression within the gay community” (57). In so doing, “gay people” were able to build bridges across lines of gender and race, build a new sense of collective gay/lesbian identity, and develop a successful template for “how gay people should enact their vision and values for social change in a way that can accomplish their strategic objectives while also remaining sensitive to identity concerns” (166).

The stories of the next two marches show how this template for organizing remained structurally similar (and thus became concretized), while infighting was distinct for each march. For example, Ghaziani traces how in 1987 the biggest source of controversy and infighting was about the demands of the march, especially whether they should be lesbian/gay-focused or also focused on “racism, sexism and US intervention in third world countries” (103). Next, Ghaziani traces how the same template was used for the 1993 march, but the movement was at a stage where it was “fighting to define its struggles as the pursuit of equal rights while not...