When Memory and Sexuality Collide: Homosentimental Style of Gay Liberation

Commemorating both the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the subsequent Gay Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Monument projects a quiet, muted homosexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the courageous and violent assertion of homosexual identity that was Stonewall. Our essay examines this strange incongruity, revealing in the process the homosentimental style—a unique rhetorical form that attempts to negotiate the many contradictory motives animating LGBT advocacy. The Gay Liberation Monument's use of homosentimentality refracts in many directions, simultaneously challenging dehumanizing rhetorics with affective appeals to care and friendship, presenting itself as assimilationist even as it offers coded indices of clone culture, and producing a doubled homosexual body—at once assimilationist and queer. Both the monument and the homosentimental style thus pose a challenge to binary conceptualizations of LGBT rights advocacy that separate assimilationist and queer politics.