Abstract
The connections between sexual desire and consummation, play, pleasure, and political protest have not been fully accounted for in social movement research about LGBT communities in the United States. In his book, Benjamin Shepard describes post-Stonewall gay liberation movements and organizations—everyone from drag queens to faeries to sex-positive lesbians and leather dykes—as enactments of political play aimed at reclaiming pleasure as a democratic right. Indeed for Shepard, such play sought to reclaim the broader meaning of the “pursuit of happiness,” where pleasure and the right to seek pleasure would be fundamental to any lived experience of freedom.
In the 1980s, play as protest took on new urgency with the advent of AIDS. Shepard adopts Freud’s psychic dualism of Thanatos (death drive) versus Eros (creative drive) to explain the dialectic between play and death in the activists’ strategies and tactics—street theater, parody and ridicule, cruising each other at meetings—which, according to Shepard, led to both policy changes and the affect necessary to build communal bonds among those men and women devastated by loss. In the concurrent harm reduction movements (e.g., needle exchanges, housing for PWAs, etc.), Shepard sees an extension of play in the sit-ins and resistance of Housing Works in New York City.
During the AIDS crisis, there had been a retrenchment vis-à-vis sexuality among the public as sex was associated with disease and death and, by extension, gay men were seen as the cause of sexual devastation. Gay men had sought to cope with the death of friends and loved ones, and struggled to create a new meaning for sex in a world with AIDS. Simultaneously, the neo-liberal order had come to rule New York City in the person of Rudy Giuliani, which focused on all kinds of public sexuality, including female sex workers. Shepard connects the history of the debates about safe sex and bathhouses in the AIDS movement to the sexual retrenchment of the neo-liberalism and “urban renewal” in New York City. In response, groups of sex-positive, pro-queer women and men formed SexPanic!. For Shepard, SexPanic! represents both the strengths and weaknesses of play as an organizing principle and, trenchantly, the fraught relationship of academic theories (i.e., Queer Theory) to activism. Finally, in the twenty-first century, Gay Shame rounds out the narrative as the most recent example of play and “street circus” as a strategy for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgenders to refocus their communities’ politics.
Shepard presents his extensive interview and participant-observation data through the lens of narrative analysis to reconstruct the affect, intentions, and actions of queer activists since Stonewall. To this end, he marshals an extraordinary array of individuals, from drag queens who were at Stonewall to recent Gay Shame protestors. Shepard himself participated in some of the organizations; unfortunately, after he briefly treats the problem of having been a participant in the movement and then writing a scholarly analysis of it, his self-critical voice disappears and the reader must discern what is Shepard’s experience and what is evidentiated critique. Within qualitative methods, arguments rage about how best to employ, interpret, and present qualitative data. Here, large portions of the text are direct quotes from informants, allowing them to speak for themselves; yet often when Shepard interjects between informants or seeks to interpret their words, the analysis derails with claims unsupported by the preceding quotations. A heavy dose of interpretive parsimony would have tightened the book’s argument. One of the difficulties of writing qualitative analysis is to integrate the disparate voices of scores of individuals to create a coherent description of social interaction and/or a particular culture. In Shepard’s text, it is often unclear when an individual represents a larger commonality in the data and when it is purely individual.
While the book overall is a strong contribution to the field, there were some weaknesses. First, the book seems to be unaware of pre-Stonewall LGBT history, as it either ignores or misinterprets the movement before 1969; it also ignores or treats problematically other gay rights organizations concurrent with the book’s narrative, such as the explosion of racial and ethnic minority gay organizing in the 1970s. Secondly, the book is so New York City-centric that the author draws some troublesome conclusions, having ignored movement centers elsewhere. Given all that is left out of the book’s contextualization, there arise sweeping claims that do not hold up, including assertions that a group or tactic changed the world or directly effected policy change, without evidence to support such claims. Again, interpretive parsimony would have averted such problems. Next, the book feels like it slips into polemic rather than rigorous, even-handed analysis. A particular political point of view, one that values play-full tactics over others, drives the book; the argument would have carried more weight had Shepard remained carefully and explicitly reflexive about his political values. There are moments where Shepard’s own enthusiasm for political play seem to slide into an argument for the aesthetics of protest as an end-in-itself.
Queer Politics and Protest is a fascinating mix of Freud, late Frankfurt school via Marcuse, and performance theory. Two key theoretical points stand out. First, Shepard relies on the nearly ubiquitous revolutionary vs. assimilationist binary that originated in the late-1960s movement itself; he then associates play with revolution and politics with reform (assimilation). For those engaged in research about LGBT activism, culture, and community, a more nuanced and complex theorizing of the range of political orientations of same-sex-attracted and gender-noncomformist individuals and groups is necessary. Second, and by far the most important contribution of the book, Shepard massages a coherent theory of the relationship between play and politics and the connection of pleasure to democracy, such that without pleasure there can be no justice. But the theory of play needed to have been pushed one step further: whereas Shepard argues for the possibility that play might break through tradition and habit, he fails to account for how the playful protest he admires can also alienate constituents among the aggrieved, and more importantly, it can also foreclose political interventions that might be more effective.
None of this, however, should detract from the book’s achievements, both in gathering together this data and in shining a spotlight on the central role that play and pleasure have had in forming the modern LGBT rights movements in the United States.