Emily K. Hobson - Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left

Emily Hobsons illuminating book, Lavender and Red, transforms our understanding of queer history. Focusing on gay and lesbian internationalism and left solidarity politics in late Cold War San Francisco, she provides a deeply researched, surprising, and compelling account of the ways a politics of affiliation can expand forms of organization, practices, vision, and impact. The stories she tells offer us new historical narratives as resources for imagining new possible futures.

Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

Lavender and Red deftly tells the story of the other L word: liberation. LGBTQ activists erupted in the 1960s committed to ending U.S. imperialism, militarism, racism, and all forms of oppression and exploitation. They fought not to win acceptance by the mainstream, heteropatriarchal society but to overturn it. By recovering the forgotten story of gay liberation, Emily Hobson revises the history of the U.S. left and reveals a political and intellectual history of how queer radicals understood and re-fashioned anti-imperialist, nationalist, feminist, and Third World thought to imagine new meanings for sexuality, community, and emancipatory politics. After reading this astonishing book, the standard Stonewall-to-marriage-equality narrative suddenly rings hollow.

Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Lavender and Red shines light on two of the most important queer colors, reminding us that somewhere over the rainbow lie visionary dreams of radical sexual politics and transformational social justice. An inspiring account of the 1970s and 1980s, when a strong gay and lesbian left fought against racism, sexism, colonialism, and war.

Marc Stein, author of Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement

In this superb book, Hobson writes the political and intellectual history of the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements that linked sexual liberation to radical solidaritythe mobilizations against imperialism, capitalism, and racism, demanding universal health care and money for AIDS, not for war. For too long, gay and lesbian activism in the 70s and 80s has been remembered as single-issue and racially white-washed. Lavender and Red is the antidote weve been waiting for.

Laura Briggs, author of Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico

Over the past decade, we have witnessed the emergence of revisionist work on the Black Power, antiwar, women of color feminist, and gay liberation movements. Emily Hobsons Lavender and Red is a brilliant addition to this vital body of scholarship. She rewrites the history of political struggles of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and, most impressively, intertwines them.

Sherie M. Randolph, author of Florynce Flo Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical

Lavender and Red is a page turner, not the case for most well-researched academic works; this story of liberation and solidarity in the gay and lesbian left, focused on the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s and 1980s, is inspiring as well as cautionary, a primer for social justice activists today as well as a solid history in the field of social movement history and theory.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Anne G. Lipow Endowment Fund for Social Justice and Human Rights of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by Stephen M. Silberstein.

COVER IMAGE

Unite to Fight! June 28 / Day of Solidarity with Gay Struggles

June 28, 1969 was the date of the Stonewall riots in New York City.

Poster designed by Donna Pillar, published and distributed by Inkworks Press, Oakland, Calif. (19742015), 1976.

The face, a coarse halftone dot image of a woman at a feminist demonstration, was taken from Lucy Stone, an early second-wave feminism poster published in 1970 by Times Change Press, New York, NY (19701974). The text read: In education, in marriage, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman [... ] Lucy Stone, 1855. A first edition of that poster credited Su Negrin as graphic artist, a second edition of the poster labeled it TCP poster #2 and did not.

Image courtesy Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi.

Image description courtesy of Lincoln Cushing.

Lavender and Red

Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left

Emily K. Hobson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

2016 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hobson, Emily K., author.

Title: Lavender and red : liberation and solidarity in the gay and lesbian left / Emily K. Hobson.

Other titles: American crossroads ; 44.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Series: American crossroads; 44 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016017328 (print) | LCCN 2016018860 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520279056 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520279063 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965706 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH : Gay liberation movementUnited States. | Sexual minoritiesUnited States.

Classification: LCC HQ 76.8. U 5 H 63 2016 (print) | LCC HQ 76.8. U 5 (ebook) | DDC 306.76/60973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017328

Manufactured in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of

Armando

Bill and Branch

Callie and Carl

David and Don

Emmanuel

Hank and Howard

Jade, Jeff, and Jos

and Jim, times two

and John, times three

Keith

Larry

Margarita, Martin, and Marvin

Michael, times four, and Miguel

Phil and Phillip

Regina, Rodrigo, and Ron

Sam, Simeon, and Stephen

Tede, Terry, Tim, Timo, Tita, Tom

Eileen Hansen (19512016)

Horacio N. Roque Ramrez (19692015)

and the many unnamed

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I offer my deep thanks to all the activists who made the histories I seek to narrate and understand in the pages that follow. Many are named and others are not, but I am deeply grateful to all who have dreamed, built, and struggled through the politics of sexual liberation and radical solidarity.

This books dedication honors first the many activists who died before I could meet them, most gone years before I began my research and most, though not all, taken by AIDS. I list their first names to recognize the unknowability and intimacy of our collective losses . All these activists appear again in the book by full name or through organizations in which they participated. Two other people whom I was fortunate to know died just as I was completing the book. Eileen Hansen was a dedicated and generous activist central to the AIDS Action Pledge and the 1987 civil disobedience at the Supreme Court; I am indebted to her contributions to my research and share in her widely felt loss. Horacio N. Roque Ramrez was a treasured scholar-activist of queer and Latina/o histories, oral history, and Central American studies. I cherished him as a colleague and wish he were here to critique my work and to keep writing.