Political memoirs and intimate confessions: Analysing four US gay liberation/gay rights militants’ memoirs

Abstract

The US gay liberation and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s are a contested historical and sociological terrain. We analyse the narrative reconstruction of militant identities in the memoirs of four gay movement militants-Martin Duberman, Amy Hoffman, Karla Jay, Arnie Kantrowitz. The article focuses on the way authors account for the interplay between their self-discovery through sexuality and through militancy. We endeavour to fully appreciate the interaction of the personal and the social in order to gauge the degree to which confessions about sexuality take on a meaning that escapes authors' control, or whether that meaning is a reflection of the authors' agency. After a brief summary of how the authors tell about their sexual history, the article analyses the four authors' distinctly different genders, generations, and political options as pertinent variables for comparison among the memoirs.

Out of the French closet: the political participation of gays and lesbians in France into perspective

“…The work of sociologists C. Broqua, O. Fillieule, and M. Voegtli remains essential in this literature, when it comes to identify the sociological characteristics of this activism, to describe individual identity processes and trajectories, or to account for disengagement (Fillieule 1997;Fillieule andBroqua 1999, 2005;Broqua 2006; Voegtli 2016). However, analyses of engagement processes need to be disentangled from AIDS fighting to unveil other mechanisms such as the role and construction of memory in activists' narratives and identity (Marche 2017), or the role of lived discrimination, childhood gender stigmatization, or collective identification, emphasized in international social-psychology (Stürmer 2004;C. Friedman and Campbell 2010;Ramirez-Valles et al 2014).…”

“Todas queríamos ser como Simone”: Las primeras lecturas de El Segundo Sexo en Argentina

“…Los relatos reflexivos sobre el pasado son construidos en una interacción entre las situaciones estructurales y las elecciones subjetivas y como tales son un elemento fundamental para comprender a los movimientos sociales (Marche, 2017).…”