The Wild Reed: “A Book About Revolutionary People That Feels Revolutionary Itself”

Since 2009 I’ve shared every year during the month of June a series of “Queer Appreciation” posts.

Each series is comprised of a number of informed and insightful writings to mark Gay Pride . . . or, as I’ve preferred to call it since 2011, Queer Appreciation.

I always try to include in each series a diverse range of writers and topics; and, in general, the writings I share are positive, proactive and celebratory.

I start this year’s Queer Appreciation series with an excerpt from Scott W. Stern’s review of Aaron Lecklider’s Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture.

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Back in October, a mini-viral tweet asked writers, “Give the worst possible elevator pitch for your book.” Aaron S. Lecklider, a professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, replied, “Queer people actually were national security risks.”

The jokey tweet alludes to a violent history: that of the “Lavender Scare,” the mid-century moral panic in which federal and state officials purged thousands of queer people from government employment on the grounds that “sexual perverts” were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists,” as one Republican politician put it in 1950. The Lavender Scare – intimately connected to but ultimately distinct from the McCarthyite “Red Scare” – contributed immensely to hateful popular understandings of queerness as a psychological disease and a danger to “normal” people.

It also led much of the burgeoning gay rights movement to insist that queers were not dangerous – at least, so long as they were clean-cut, white, bourgeois, and conformed to conventional gender norms.

Implicit in this commitment to “respectable queerness” was an erasure of the presence of queer people who did not fit neatly into normative boxes. Post-Stonewall, those who were often marginalized and ignored included the radical queers that threw bottles at Stonewall, founded the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), and fundamentally changed the trajectory of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But what of the radical queers in the years before the Lavender Scare? Who were they?

One stab at answering this question is Lecklider’s invigorating new book Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture – the one about how queer people “actually were national security risks.” Indeed, writes Lecklider, in the first half of the twentieth century, “a broad cross-section of sexual dissidents . . . took advantage of their space on the margins of American society to throw themselves into leftist campaigns.” In other words, queer people were abundant among American radicals decades before the rise of an organized mass movement for gay rights. And while much of the scholarship on queer history “discounts the Old Left due to its perceived homophobia,” Lecklider locates a “counter-history where possibility, visibility, and resistance converged at the intersection of homosexuality and the Left.”

. . . Lecklider has supplemented his archival sleuthing with insightful interpretations of “cultural works” – novels, poems, and memoirs – many of which reveal far more of a queer presence on the Left than, say, the official records of the Communist Party. The result is a startling and joyful work of scholarship, a book about revolutionary people that feels revolutionary itself.

The Wild Reed

Monday, June 07, 2021

“A Book About Revolutionary People That Feels Revolutionary Itself”

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