Many Roads Led to Gay Rights: Place, Activism, and the Church

The history of oppressed minorities has never been situated or even arisen only in the academy. For instance, oppressed minorities’ histories have a much broader audience than conventional scholarly books. Even histories deeply rooted in historiographical debates and theoretical concepts have gained a wide public readership. Taught in Freedom Schools or in the back of the Oscar Wilde Bookstore, these historical accounts have inspired and guided further activism. They mattered beyond the academy, and this is still true today. Jim Downs’ Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, Lillian Faderman’s Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, and Heather R. White’s Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights share a goal of explaining recent progress toward gay equality. This is a traditional historical question, but it is also an important contemporary political question. The LGBTQ community has gained rights through an astounding transformation of the mores and laws regulating sexuality in the United States but still has a ways to go—determining how we made such progress so far makes intellectual and political sense.

Downs, Faderman, and White all essentially argue that progress has come through the construction of a shared community. In making this argument, these historians are seemingly working in the tradition of E. P. Thompson, Benedict Anderson, Nancy Cott, George Sanchez, and many others. Though all three authors agree that progress has come through the careful construction of an LGBTQ community, they attribute the construction of those communities to very different causes. LGBTQ historians have already identified the construction of a gay community as caused by specific conditions—of political economy, of urbanization, of state power, and more. Others have debated whether new sexual identities were transmitted from elites to the working class or vice versa, and whether the histories of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people should be considered together or separately. These three thoughtful books continue this tradition by naming civic institutions, political activism, and the church as further possible agents in the creation of a modern gay community.

Downs’ book is perhaps most explicitly engaged in the project of identifying the construction of a community. For Downs, it is important that a gay identity not be based on sex alone. Therefore he identifies the construction of a gay community not in bars, bath houses, or other commercial sexual establishments of the 1970s, but instead in the construction of a church, a bookstore, a shared history, an independent press, and political and material aid for gay prisoners. He does this in five gripping chapters that focus on a handful of activists (Troy Perry, Craig Rodwell, Ned Katz, Stephen Donaldson, and others.). These are flanked by an introductory chapter on the massacre of a gay congregation at the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans and a concluding chapter on the collapse of the radical gay community. The first chapter’s account of the massacre inspired this book and was the largest massacre against LGBTQ Americans until the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre that occurred after Downs published his book. Downs sees the Upstairs Lounge victims as forgotten literally, in our not knowing who they were at the time or since, and symbolically in our focus on the sexual side of sexual liberation. The next chapter describes the founding of gay churches, particularly the Metropolitan Community Church. These religious institutions are important reminders that some gay men and women embraced religion even in the midst of gay liberation (an insight that White explicates even more fully). The next chapter describes the founding of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City as a self-conscious effort to make...