>On Sat, 18 Mar 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> What is it about the Cold Warrior's paranoid equivalence of Red and
>> queer? Has that ever been explored in depth?
>
>Oh my yes. The most straightforward approach to this question is Barbara
>Ehrenreich's in _The Hearts of Men_. Her answer in a nutshell is that Gay
>liberation changed common sense. We now commonly think that some men are
>gay and some aren't. But before Stonewall, the common understanding was
>that every man was in danger of becoming gay if he didn't watch out.
>Insufficient exercise of aggression, insufficient self-discipline, in a
>word, insufficient machismo (aka weakness, softness, effeminateness)
>invited the danger of homosexuality on a personal level and takeover by
>the commies on a societal level. Consequently it wasn't an accident that
>the anti-war movement was tied up with an androgynous drift: they were two
>sides of the same revolt, at least as the system was experienced.
On this subject of gender subversion in the anti-war movement, see Terence Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York's Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971," _Radical History Review_ 62:1-2 (Spring 1995). On p. 109, there is a photo of a gay man wearing a T-shirt that reads "Suck Cock to Beat the Draft." In fact, this entire queer issue of _Radical History Review_ is worth reading, and it has some very interesting articles that investigate what the Cold War culture in America said about sex, gender, and sexuality: John D'Emilio, "Homophobia and the Trajectory of Postwar American Radicalism: The Case of Bayard Rustin"; David Harley Serlin, "Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet"; John Howard, "The Library, the Park, and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in Post-World War II Atlanta"; & Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, "Telling Tales: Oral History and the Construction of Pre-Stonewall Lesbian History." (The emphasis is, alas, on men, though, as usual.)
Yoshie