By Marc Stein, York University

This panel encouraged scholars to revisit the history of the sexual
revolution and think more deeply about intersections between race and
sexuality in post-World War Two U.S. history. Political scientist Cathy
Cohen (University of Chicago) chaired the session, which featured papers
by Heather R. White (New College of Florida), Gillian Frank (Stony Brook
University), and Timothy Stewart-Winter (Rutgers University-Newark).
Marc Stein (York University) was the commentator.

Heather White’s paper, which focused on the Council on Religion and the
Homosexual in San Francisco during the 1960s, argued that religious
liberals—mostly white, straight, and Protestant and very much influenced
by the use of religious discourses and practices in the civil rights
movement–played important roles in the homophile movement. The paper
offered a balanced assessment of the contributions and limitations of
homophile religious liberalism and explored the uses and abuses of
race-based analogies by gay and lesbian religious advocates. The
conclusion of the paper suggested that these analogies tended to erase
not only the existence of gays and lesbians of color but also the
existence of gay and lesbian clergy.

Gillian Frank’s paper examined the intersecting politics of gender,
sexuality, and race in Michigan’s debates about busing and abortion in
the 1970s. More specifically, the paper argued that racialized
discourses of child protection and family values were central in local
and national debates about busing and abortion, which in turn helped
constitute the politics of the New Right. Exploring the racialized
aspects of abortion politics and the sexualized aspects of busing
politics, the paper emphasized that conservative discourses of child
protection ultimately proved more powerful than liberal discourses of
child welfare.

Timothy Stewart-Winter’s paper argued that the development of upscale
gay white neighborhoods in Chicago in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s should
be understood in relation to the city’s persistent patterns of racial
segregation. Borrowing the concept of the “second ghetto” from Arnold
Hirsch, the paper emphasized that this was not Chicago’s first “gay
ghetto” and criticized local Democratic politicians and gay business
interests for encouraging “ethnic-style gay mobilization” and promoting
the development of a predominantly white and upscale gay neighborhood.