Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State Since the 1970s - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251857 ISBN 13: 9780812251852

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of essays that demonstrate how LGBT people played critical roles in local, state, and national politics

In the 1970s, queer Americans demanded access not only to health and social services but also to mainstream Democratic and Republican Party politics. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s made the battles for access to welfare, health care, and social services for HIV-positive Americans, many of them gay men, a critically important story in the changing relationship between sexual minorities and the government. The 1980s and 1990s marked a period in which religious right attacks on the civil rights of minorities, including LGBT people, offered opportunities for activists to create campaigns that could mobilize a base in mainstream politics and contribute to the gradual legitimization of sexual minorities in American society.

Beyond the Politics of the Closet features essays by historians whose work on LGBT history delves into the decades between the mid-1970s and the millennium, a period in which the relationship between activist networks, the state, capitalism, and political parties became infinitely more complicated. Examining the crucial relationship between sexuality, race, and class, the volume highlights the impact gay rights politics and activism have had on the wider American political landscape since the rights revolutions of the 1960s.

The three sections of Beyond the Politics of the Closet conceptualize LGBT politics both chronologically and thematically. The first section highlights the ways in which the immediate post-rights revolution period created new demands on the part of sexual minorities for social services, especially in health care and housing. The second examines the impact of the AIDS crisis on different aspects of national and local LGBT politics. The last section considers how analyzing LGBT politics can reorient our understanding of "the closet" and illuminate the challenges for those seeking to integrate questions of sexual rights into broader political narratives, whether of the left or the right.

Contributors: Ian M. Baldwin, Katie Batza, Jonathan Bell, Julio Capó, Jr., Rachel Guberman, Clayton Howard, Kevin Mumford, Dan Royles, Timothy Stewart-Winter

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Bell is Professor of U.S. History at University College London.

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A Clinic Comes Out: Idealism, Pragmatism, and Gay Health Services in Boston, 1971-1985

Catherine Batza

Today Boston's Fenway Community Health Center is closely associated with the city's LGBTQ communities, as it presides as one of the largest and most influential gay health institutions in the United States, offering a wide array of services, conducting trailblazing research, and consulting the larger medical profession on how to best serve members of the LGBTQ communities. However, even as the first decade of the clinic's existence coincided with the 1970s and gay liberation, gay and to a lesser extent lesbian health, politics, and identities factored only tangentially in the origins and initial growth of the clinic. The clinic began in 1971, serving and unifying the diverse population in the emerging Fenway neighborhood as part of the neighborhood's response to destructive state and municipal urban renewal campaigns. However, by the early 1980s, the enforcement of new government regulations focused on efficiency and professionalism posed a challenge to the Fenway clinic community and opposed the clinic's philosophy and organizational structure. As it struggled to adapt to the new political and economic environment, the clinic reluctantly shifted its focus to the gay (and lesbian, though initially less so) community of larger Boston. Responding to both the AIDS crisis and the lesbian baby boom within months of its new emphasis on gay and lesbian health, the Fenway clinic quickly solidified its reputation as an important gay medical institution. Thus, while consistently centered on "community," the community at the heart of the Fenway clinic shifted over time from the racially and economical diverse residents immediately surrounding the clinic to a constantly expanding community of sexual and gender minorities in the larger city and region.

The clinic's unexpected and protracted coming-out story makes meaningful additions to historical understanding of this time period. First, the federal, state, and local governments played a critical role in creating what became an important and long-lasting gay institution, illustrating that the state's relationship to sexual minorities in this period needs much more nuance and complexity than current scholarship offers. The Fenway clinic's history also decenters the role of gay liberation in 1970s gay institution building. Rather, the "straight" origins of Fenway locate gay health activism within the reverberations of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society domestic policies and a national conversation about health and poverty rather than emanating from gay liberation. Centered in Boston, the Fenway neighborhood's history continues to expand the map of LGBTQ history beyond just New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles but does so in a way that highlights the important role of a racially diverse low-income neighborhood rather than a predominantly white middle-class gay enclave. In these ways, the Fenway clinic illuminates the politics of the closet in the age of gay liberation, Ronald Reagan, and AIDS.

The clinic threw out nearly all of its historical records as part of a move in the early 1980s, so the bulk of this history results from oral histories, secondary sources, and tangentially related archives. This approach proved quite challenging at times, as oral history subjects often proved difficult to locate and/or had difficulty remembering specifics. Additionally, the calamity and trauma of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s often overshadowed or minimized the work of the clinic in the 1970s in many oral history retellings. However, with use of a snowball method for identifying interview subjects as well as a timeline of historical events compiled through newspaper reporting and a menagerie of similar sources ranging from medical journals to personal correspondence found in collections across the country, this history took shape as though a very complex jigsaw puzzle.

The Beginning

The idea of opening a health clinic in the Fenway neighborhood came to two resident activists after they visited a newly opened Black Panther-operated health clinic that earned notoriety in the local press and fame among Boston activists. That clinic not only provided health services to the surrounding community but also politically mobilized area residents. It also stood directly in the path of bulldozers slated to raze the neighborhood in preparation for the Inner Belt Road, or what would have been called I-695, that would demolish the community. The Black Panther's free clinic, consisting of just a trailer, embodied the struggles of neighborhood residents who had limited access to health care and whose poverty had placed them in the sights of redevelopers. David Scondras, the director of community services at the Boston Center for Older Americans in Fenway, remembered how he saw the Black Panther Clinic as "an organizing tool to get everyday people who otherwise were not very political involved in the Black Panther Party. . . . It gave all of us an idea, which was that we should go out to the neighborhood and start organizing our community."

The political strategy behind the Black Panther Clinic resonated with the Fenway activists, as developers and bulldozers from the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) also threatened their financially struggling neighborhood. The duties of the BRA, which was funded by the federal, state, and local governments, were numerous, stretching across the spectrum of urban planning and development and giving the BRA overwhelming and omnipotent political power in every step of the process. One community activist recalled that the BRA urban renewal projects, "also known as urban demolition," were massive, sweeping, and often corrupt. In 1965, the BRA formally set its sights on the Fenway neighborhood. Building upon an expansion plan submitted by the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in the Fenway neighborhood, the BRA created the expansive Fenway Urban Renewal Plan that outlined the demolition and redevelopment of much of the Fenway neighborhood. The approval of the plan by the Boston City Council on November 1, 1965, set the plan in motion. Within two years, the BRA had acquired federal funding. Soon, wrecking balls and bulldozers demolished over three hundred low-income housing units on the eastern border of the Fenway neighborhood as part of the first phase of the Fenway Urban Renewal Plan. Discussing one portion of this first phase of construction, one longtime Fenway activist and resident remembered that "where the new Christian Science Church is, used to be I think eighty apartments and twenty stores and nice little . . . brick buildings. All that was torn down and people were displaced." Initially, the BRA met disorganization among residents of Fenway. In fact, the concept of Fenway as a neighborhood emerged out of the BRA's plan and the residents' response. Aware of both the political power of the Black Panther Clinic and the unmet medical needs of their own racially diverse and economically struggling residents, David Scondras and a Northeastern University graduate nursing student, Linda Beane, teamed up, using their complementary interests to open the renegade Fenway clinic in the Boston Center for Older Americans. The clinic was one of many community-based organizations, including a food co-op, a newspaper, and child care, designed to make residents more politically engaged, unified, and organized to combat the state-approved developers attacking their neighborhood. In short, the clinic served as a larger effort by residents to create a neighborhood and invoke a sense of community in Fenway designed to thwart the BRA and gentrification efforts.

On a summer evening in 1971, the first in a long line of Fenway residents in need of medical care arrived at the Boston Center for Older Americans, a senior drop-in center located on the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812251857
• ISBN 13: 9780812251852
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Herausgeber: Bell Jonathan
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland