Love-Politics: Lesbian Wedding Practices in Canada and the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s

In 1972 the Brooklyn - Based lesbian feminist periodical Echo of Sappho profiled Sandy and June, a white butch and femme couple, on the occasion of their recent wedding ceremony. Sandy and June were one among hundreds of same-sex couples who had exchanged vows at Father Robert Mary Clement's Church of the Beloved Disciple, which opened in 1970 to cater to the spiritual needs of lesbians and gays. When asked how they felt about their wedding "in relationship to the women's movement," Sandy and June did not respond directly, describing instead what their marriage meant to them: it was "a holy union and very beautiful," they said. "This church makes you feel as normal as anyone could be."

Sandy and June's embrace of normal seems to anticipate the queer Left critique of the marriage equality movement that dominated American lesbian and gay politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Where once one's outsider status provided a perch from which to critique how capitalism and liberal democratic states worked hand in hand to privatize sexuality and to advocate for collectivist responses to social inequalities and injustices, Lisa Duggan argues, the modern marriage equality movement "upholds, sustains, and seeks inclusion within … heterosexist institutions… while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption."¹ June and Sandy's seeming inability to draw a connection between their wedding and the women's movement appears to confirm the depoliticizing nature of marriage.

The problem, however, is not that Sandy and June failed to grasp the radical potential of the women's movement and its critique of the oppressive nature of marriage and monogamy. It is that the tools we use to assess the post–World War II era, tools that draw on early feminist critiques developed in periodicals like Echo of Sappho, fail to grasp Sandy and June. As butch and femme—twentieth-century cultural identities in which Canadian and American women adopted and adapted masculine and feminine cultural codes to give shape and expression to same-sex sexual identity and desire—Sandy and June were what we today call "genderqueer." For them, and for women like them, genderqueerness, sexual desire, and intimacy wound together in an "erotic dance," but to the rest of their world, their genderqueerness marked them as freaks.² Wedding ceremonies, which, among lesbians in Canada and the United States, were common only among butches and femmes and studs and fishes (parallel identities in the black community), were one of the ways lesbians asserted a public feeling of love, and in the 1970s it was transformed into a political claim not for equality as normative political subjects but for equal standing with heterosexual citizens as non-normative queers. When Sandy and June wed, they followed a decades-old practice of transforming romantic, illicit love into a theory of justice. They practiced "love-politics."³

In her 2013 article "Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post Intersectionality," Jennifer C. Nash examines second-wave American black feminists' discourses about love advanced by, for example, writer Alice Walker, poet June Jordan, and playwright Ntozake Shange. By theorizing love, they transformed the personal into a theory of justice. According to Nash, however, these theories have thus far been narrowly viewed as a practice of self-valuation.⁴ They are much more than that. Love-politics as practiced by black feminists in America represent a "significant call for ordering the self and transcending the self, a strategy for remaking the self and for moving beyond the limitations of selfhood … [for] producing new forms of political communities as a kind of affective politics."⁵ Nash's more expansive view allows her to show that affective love-politics departed from the identity-based politics that dominated 1970s and 1980s black feminist (and mainstream lesbian and gay) politics in the United States and Canada. Although Nash's main objective is to push back against the marginalization of black feminist thought as a relic of...