Lavender and Red

Abstract

LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements. The history of the gay and lesbian left reveals a far different story: a movement whose radicals understood their sexual liberation as interdependent with solidarity against imperialism, war, and racism. The gay and lesbian left was born in the late 1960s but flourished up through the end of the Cold War and the depths of the AIDS epidemic. Its participants argued that anti-imperialism and anti-militarism were necessary to sexual liberation and that sexual liberation was key to revolutionary change. Across the 1970s, gay and lesbian leftists embraced socialist and women of color feminism and organized opposition to U.S. militarism and the New Right. In the Reagan years they challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, collaborated with their peers in Nicaragua, and mentored the first direct action against AIDS. The gay and lesbian left found its center in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it networked queer, radical, and Central American communities. Gay and lesbian leftists built queer politics through radical internationalism and crafted a vision for sexual freedom that moved beyond liberal or neoliberal inclusion in the United States.

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