Homosexual: Oppression And Liberation
Dennis Altman
Revolutionary social change in the past has occurred within systems characterized by institutionalized heterosexuality and oppression of the female. Gay revolution addresses itself to the total elimination of the sexual caste system around which our oppressive society is organized and through which distinctions of class and race are reinforced and maintained. The target remains the same: the ruling?class male and the ruling?class aspirations of every other male, but the old definition of that target as simply economically oppressive no longer. holds. It is now recognized that any Marxist?Socialistanalysis must acknowledge the sexist underpinnings of every politicaleconomic base.
Thus, gay liberation cannot be considered apart from women’s liberation. Gay liberation is in reality feminist movement. It is of course out of the black and women’s liberation movements that gay liberation formulated itself and derived the courage to become a movement in the first place.
Jill Johnston is a columnist for The Village Voice.
The connections and disjunctions between the three movements are adroitly explored by Dennis Altman in his book “Homosexual.” Among all the books to date by and about the new political homosexual, the Altman book is a pleasure. Altman arrived in the United States on leave from his post as teacher of American politics at Sydney University in Australia in the summer of 1970, just when the gayliberation movement was gathering momentum. His book is a really sensitive, lucid account of his personal liberation in coming out and participating in the movement, as well as a penetrating analysis of the political premises and goals and philosophical background of the move
As the books to date have all been by males it is not surprising that gay liberation is still considered a basically male phenomenon. Altman is the first man to recognize the woman. I was going to say to recognize the woman and her oppression as pivotal, in the strategy and goals of the sexual revolution, and that’s true, he does. but I would like to underscore his marked difference from the others by saying he recognizes the woman, period.
Donn Teal, in his bulky documentation, “The Gay Militants,” set aside a special and short chapter for the lesbian contingent, with occasional references elsewhere. Arthur Bell’s “Dancing the Gay Lib Blues” is an appreciable contribution to the cumulative effect of a literature we hope should soon begin to seriously undermine the determined efforts of the psychiatric profession to take over where the church left off in defining homosexuality as an illness if not a sin. Bell as reporter and activist blends the story of the civillibertarian radical homosexual organization he helped to found with the tale of his hairy romance with one of the other leaders. But the casual or curious reader who wants to know about the movement will close the book with the impression that women had nothing whatever to do with gay liberation other than as walk?ons or extras patiently waiting in the wings.
George Weinberg, in his “Society and the Healthy Homosexual,” is somewhat inclusive of women, whom he has treated along with men as psychotherapist, but the inclusion is more out of politeness than political consciousness. Unlike Altman he isn’t stepping very far out of his male privilege to perceive women. He persists in the masculine usurpation of generic form, i.e., “I would never consider a patient healthy unless he (my italics) had overcome his prejudice against homosexuality.” Nonetheless, his limited politics aside, and as the quoted sentence indicates. Weinberg makes another important contribution to the dissident literature affirming homosexual identity in the of centuries of persecution and discrimination.
Weinberg is one of a small but growing brigade of dissenters within their own profession–the profession which somehow inherited from the church, the task of legitimizing oppression in order to safeguard the sexual caste system. The lesbian and male homosexual by their very existence are a threat to the programs of
marriage ? family ? home that every child is conditioned to believe is “the true way.” The gay and radical feminist movements join in advocating an end to this oppressive institution out of which the false category of homosexuality was created and stigmatized. Having been created, the new homosexual now asserts his or her identity with a vengeance in order to reclaim our natural birthright to pleasure without guilt or secrecy.
Both Weinberg and Altman, and particularly Altman in making himself the center of his study, convey the psychic damage sustained by the great majority of homosexuals who have internalized the prejudice against them by the culture. Altman writes: “Most of us have struggled for a time at least against the realization of our gayness, and coming out is therefore a long and painful process.” Weinberg that “homosexuals have for too long been accomplices in the silence surrounding them.” If you don’t say it, it doesn’t exist. On a Cavett show recently a guest was unable to utter the word lesbian. Writing of the Gay Day parade, summer, 1970, in New York, Weinberg said, “Nature smiled that day — perhaps because homosexuality is found everywhere in nature. Man is the only creature beneath the
Man. Weinberg’s male standard inadvertently works here to indicate the common oppressor of both women and gay males: the straight ruling?class man. Altman recognizes the precarious and crucially important position of the lesbian in the middle between her straight sisters and her gay brothers, caught as she is in the dilemmas of “dual allegiance and dual persecution.” He documents the inevitable withdrawal of the gay women from the male?dominated gay organizations and their subsequent alignment with the feminists, who were ill prepared to accept this their most rebellious element.
The new political lesbian was quick to see that the gay male is also the Man and that their common oppressor lay within the gay male as well at in his straight brother insomuch as both partake of the general male privilege. The sexism of the gay male is no less flagrant than that of the straight one. The lesbian was not long fooled by the camaraderie of the shared interest of loving one’s own sex and the illusion of an “outside” oppressor common to both.
It’s one thing for a man to be homosexual. Quite another for a woman. The lesbian woman is the clearly disenfranchised of the four sexes. She has abdicated her inherited right, or rather command, to participate in the male privilege by association, through bed and even friendship. Here is the essence of her “dual persecution” alluded to by Altman: male prejudice within gay liberation and heterosexual fear within women’s liberation.
After all, all but the most radical of feminists are maleidentified or straight women and as such remain the oppressor of both themselves and the lesbian or the lesbian within them Waiting to be liberated. As the lesbian sees it, the feminist movement is still basically a “reform” movement directed toward bigger and better participation in the male privilege through equality in his system and thus a further denial of her own identity in the wages of power within the same sexual caste system which she claims to be the source of her deprivation. Even so, the lesbian is now dedicated to the true radicalization of feminism by weaning her straight sisters away from their efforts to reform the institution of itself.
The constant identification by the media of the lesbian with the male homosexual movement is a clever device to separate women from each other, as though we’re not already separated enough, and to continue the negation of the sexuality of women by the subtle (if unconscious) co?option of the most upfront sexual women (the political lesbians) by the already overwhelmingly recognized sexuality of the male, whether straight or gay, and perhaps especially the gay in his well known pursuit of variety and quantity. The woman is again a token — this time in the context of the gay revolution. By media pro
In reality the lesbian feminists, as many of us see it, constitute the revolutionary core of the feminist movement. Both Altman and Weinberg, and again Altman in particular, observe the sad irony that the less stigmatized sexuality of the lesbian compared to the more overt persecution of the gay male is a reflection of the inferior position of women in the society. From this perspective the claim of the militant gay male activist to greater persecution than the lesbian from straight society is a truth that continues to obscure the unrecognized sexuality of the woman, who is naturally not so persecuted for a condition she is barely exhibiting and, following which, she is not imputed to possess.
The inferior position of women is reflected by her passive and invisible sexuality. Her status as sex symbol in no way indicates that her sexual needs are a serious consideration. Nor is lesbianism taken very seriously while the majority of women remain vulnerable to the male privilege that alone defines the norm of sexuality.
Although I appreciate the struggle of a male like Altman to recognize women and purge himself of his chauvinism, protest the token inclusion of the lesbian feminist in most recent and current literature about homosexuality as well as in the media, and also, while I’m at it, in the gay established newspapers, which advertise themselves as gay without qualifying their gayness as male.
Ultimately, in the merry?goround of the four sexes, the gay male will liberate his straight brothers and the gay woman likewise her straight sisters. In that faraway day of sexual liberation when we are no longer organized around the principle of the domination of one sex by another, the principle by which heterosexuality in the institutionalized nuclear family is defined, we will of course no longer be gay or straight, or man or woman –either we’ll all be a woman and re?create ourselves as once before, parthenogenetically, or we’ll all be a nowhere man trundling off into the everlasting void while babbling incoherently infinnegans wake. ~ Jill Johnston, New York Times, Feb. 20, 1972
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Details
| ISBN | 9780814706244 |
| Genre | LGBT Studies/Social Sciences; Sexuality |
| Publication Date | 01-Aug-93 |
| Publisher | NYU Press |
| Format | Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 278 |
| LoC Classification | HQ76 .A585 1993 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| Subject | General & Miscellaneous Gay & Lesbian Studies; History of Homosexuality; Politics & Gay Rights |
| BookID | 5483 |
