CHAPTER 2 Fordism and Identity

It was only after the Second World War that the gay/straight binary began to take the form it assumed in North America and Western Europe by the 1970s. The /gay identity that became dominant in imperialist countries in the 1970s, and in subsequent decades in much of the rest of the world, differed from the many other forms of same-sex identity that had existed in human history or even under capitalism. Although in its earliest and most working-class forms, lesbian/gay identity overlapped with sexual inversion, its full-fledged form was reserved for people who had both sexual and emotional ties with their own sex; who generally did not conclude cross-sex marriages or form heterosexual families (unlike, say, latter-day gay icon Oscar Wilde); and who did not radically change their or sex role in adopting a lesbian/gay sexuality (unlike trans- gendered people in a great variety of cultures). In the same-sex relation- ships formed according to this pattern, extending over time from the middle class to a far broader range of the population, both partners considered them- selves part of the same lesbian/gay community, networks and even movement. This would have been a bizarre notion to millions of men around the world who penetrate transwomen or youths without considering themselves gay. It was unsettling to millions of women at the less explicit end of Adrienne Rich’s ‘lesbian continuum’.1 The new same-sex formation depended on the maturation of a new, Fordist regime of accumulation, notably involving rising wages and a welfare state. Fordism also provided a basis for racial liberalism and decolonisation, and a new black militancy, as well as a broader, society-wide transition from old conceptions of manhood and womanhood to a more ‘performative’ definition of gender, the second wave of feminism, and pervasive sexualisation linked to a commercial scene. These were the conditions for the establishment of a new, ‘gay-dominant’ same-sex regime, in which and other patterns were marginalised. In many neo-colonial countries and in the Soviet bloc, China and Cuba, however, the basic conditions for lesbian/gay communities were absent. There

1 Adam 1985, p. 658; Rich 1983; Wekker 1999. Fernbach gave an early and clear account of the uniqueness of lesbian/gay identity among historically existing forms of same-sex sexuality (1981, pp. 71–5).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004288119_006 162 CHAPTER 2 the binary was imposed instead through the promotion of and repression of . By the 1960s in Western Europe and the Americas, repression evoked a new wave of resistance – lesbian/ – linked to socialist, feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements and to the Nicaraguan, Mexican, Brazilian and South African left. A new gay left briefly challenged the gay/straight divide at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, before the new sexual regime was consolidated in the later 1970s and 1980s. Lesbian/gay identity thus originally had a dual and contradictory political character. Its foundations were laid almost invisibly and on a modest scale in Western Europe, North America and parts of Latin America in the two decades after the Second World War, through the expansion of a lesbian/homosexual commercial scene and the efforts of small ‘’ groups. Homophile activists’ approach was in continuity with the perspective of pre-war middle- class homosexuals, expressed in patient work in the 1950s to urge ‘inverts’ to conform to a more respectable model. In this respect, lesbian/gay identity was a precursor of today’s gay normality. But the big breakthrough for lesbian/gay identity in the years after 1968 was partly a break with middle-class homosexuality, inspired by a vision of libera- tion that at least for a few years was inclusive of trans people, hustlers and sexual outlaws generally. Lesbian/gay liberation was also initially consciously inspired by and connected to radical feminism and black and anti-imperialist struggles. By the late 1970s and 1980s (as discussed later in this chapter), radi- cal lesbian/gay politics was having at least a modest impact on the interna- tional radical left, including the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the Brazilian Workers Party and South African anti-apartheid movements. Though this liberationist impulse was submerged in the 1980s by resurgent gay reformism, it can – and whenever it is uncovered anew, does – still serve as an inspiration for radicalism today.

Expansion and Sexualisation

The social backdrop of the post-war decades helps explain the dynamics of emergent lesbian/gay communities. Among the preconditions for their break- through on a mass scale were a general increase in people’s living standards and economic security, made possible in part by the expanding welfare state, which made autonomous sexual lives possible for more people than ever before. The breakthrough also reflected a certain relative social homogene- ity in any one country of millions of people who came out around the 1970s, thanks in part to generational bonds and in part to the narrowing of economic