AHA Annual Meeting
Saturday, January 8, 2011

Report by Leila J. Rupp

This session offered three papers on different aspects of organizing around same-sex sexuality before the emergence of the contemporary gay liberation movement.

Leila J. Rupp, in “Transnational Homophile Organizing: The International Committee for Sexuality Equality,” discussed an organization founded in Amsterdam in 1951 that brought together homophile movements throughout Northern and Western Europe and, a bit later, the United States. Although the organization existed for only about a decade, she argued that, through its creation of a transnational network of activists, formation of a homophile identity that crossed national borders, and activism on behalf of equality directed at both individual countries and supranational bodies, the group links transnational organizing in the interwar period with the emergence of the contemporary global gay/lesbian movement.

In his paper, “Frank Kameny and the Beginnings of LGBT Militancy,” David Carter argued for the central role of Kameny in the homophile militancy that preceded Stonewall. Carter pointed particularly to Kameny’s petition to the Supreme Court asking the justices to take his case and direct the government to give him back the job he lost for being homosexual. Kameny’s unapologetic insistence that homosexuality was just as natural and acceptable as homosexuality served, Carter argued, as an assertion of gay pride before the emergence of gay liberation and underlay his insistence that the movement was a civil rights struggle.

Pablo Ben’s paper, “Peronism, the LGBT Movement and Authoritarian Rule in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s,” was rudely interrupted by the fire alarm, but everyone was able to return and hear the entire paper. Ben discussed the origins and development of the Argentine Frente de Liberación Homosexual, or Homosexual Liberation Front, which emerged in the late 1960s. It was politically isolated from the left, which it saw as its natural ally, and ended when the military dictatorship came to power in 1976. Ben detailed the history of the organization and the social and political developments in Argentina that led to the development of the Frente and, eventually greater acceptance of homosexuality.

Felicia Kornbluh, who both chaired and commented on the session, taking over the latter capacity from John D’Emilio, who was unable to attend because of family responsibilities, generously ceded most of her time to the audience, given the interruption to the session. She raised two main questions:  the relationship of the transnational to the national, particularly whether the transnational really made a difference; and the role of women, since they played a minor part at best in all three papers.

Together, the papers pointed to the continuing decentering of Stonewall as a transformative moment, since the International Committee for Sexual Equality and the militance of Frank Kameny preceded Stonewall and the Argentine Frente organized before the members learned in 1971 of the events in New York. Nevertheless, the connections between national struggles represented by the International Committee, Kameny’s participation in transnational conferences in the 1970s, and the inspiration Argentine activists drew from other countries all confirm that there are comparative and transnational stories still to be told.