Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994 (review)

This is one of those rare books that builds bridges across divides. It connects distinct sociological sub-specialties, unites narrative history with structural analysis, melds quantitative and qualitative data, and weaves together institutional and cultural approaches to the study of social reality — all while telling a compelling story.

In Forging Gay Identities, Elizabeth Armstrong successfully provides a novel reinterpretation of the development of gay and lesbian movements, communities, and identities in the U.S. Her focus is on the self-proclaimed "gay Mecca" of San Francisco — by no means the modal case, but crucial for an understanding of the broader tendencies of gay life in this country. Armstrong traces the trajectory of mainstream lesbian and gay politics over half a century, but the cornerstone of her argument concerns what she calls the "gay identity movement" that took shape in the 1970s. Overshadowed by the preceding phase of radical gay liberation in many historical accounts, the gay identity movement was pivotal, Armstrong argues, for the consolidation of a distinctive organizational field. Using a carefully constructed database of San Francisco-based gay organizations, Armstrong charts the phenomenal explosion of gay and lesbian groups from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s. As Armstrong notes, group formation followed the principle of "gay plus one": organizations found their raison d'être in the union of gayness with any other specific social interest, be it softball or suicide prevention, Catholicism or sadomasochism.

Armstrong's point is that all this "banal functional diversification" is really quite interesting in at least two respects. First, in contrast to the monotone portrait of social movements suggested by at least some scholars, the gay identity movement was "simultaneously cultural, political, and organizational" (p. 13). Second, if a typical version of identity politics involves a group's projection of a totalizing sameness, then the gay identity movement's organizing logic of "unity through diversity" accomplished something rather different — the promotion of a loose confederation that papered over real differences in the interest of community building and the advancement of civil rights.

In sketching this portrait, Armstrong draws heavily on conceptions of "fields" developed by organizational sociologists, deliberately uniting that scholarship with the work of social movement analysts to describe the creation of a field of identity-based organizations as a political and cultural project. And by identifying the inner workings of the field, Armstrong is also able to make sense of its characteristic exclusions. In a chapter focusing on gender, race, and class divisions, Armstrong observes that lesbian feminists and lesbians and gay men of color often found themselves on the outside of the gay identity movement precisely because they repudiated the "gay plus one" logic. In place of the assumption that gayness was the master identity and the unifying term, these groups refused to subordinate their other identities: Being an African American gay man was just not the same as being a gay hiker. Thus, in the end, the "celebration of diversity" that characterized the gay identity movement was, too often, a celebration of "ideological and sexual diversity among white, middle-class men."

Armstrong observes that the gay identity movement in the 1970s and 1980s combined two "logics": an "interest group" logic of pursuing rights and reforms, and an "identity" logic that sought authenticity through visibility. (She makes the interesting observation that most scholarship on the lesbian and gay movement has taken for granted that these distinct logics would coexist, thereby failing to track the kinds of political and ideological work that made their alignment seem sensible.) She also describes a third, "redistributive" logic that, along with the identity logic, characterized the preceding phase of radical gay liberation. Although Armstrong uses these concepts in a helpful way to characterize different expressions of lesbian and gay politics over a long span of time, I had some quibbles with her deployment of them. First, it seems to...