How did lesbians and gay men in the peace movements of the 1960s and early 1970s find ways to work to change American foreign policy without having to remain silent about their sexual orientation? These activists supported the same goals as did their heterosexual allies: stopping the Vietnam War, curbing American interventions in the Third World, and ending the nuclear arms race. However, despite the self-proclaimed radicalism of many heterosexual men in these movements, they frequently shared the homophobic values and practices that characterized Cold War American society. They usually dominated the groups working for peace, often deriding opponents as "faggots" and, in the process, cajoling male recruits into proving their own masculinity by following orders. Women were commonly pressured into having sex with male colleagues to demonstrate their political solidarity and their femininity. Frequently, these men justified such rhetoric and practices by referencing the homophobia and misogyny which they perceived as inherent to white working-class, Black Power, and Third World movements and cultures as authentic revolutionary attitudes.  These hostile movement cultures were further exacerbated by infiltrators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose agents spread rumors about the sexual orientation of specific activists in order to discredit them. Gay-baiting took its toll upon unknown numbers of lesbians and gay men, compelling some to lie and hide their sexual orientation, while driving others from the peace movements altogether.

Some lesbians and gay men found safe spaces in the peace movements to express themselves as openly and honestly as did their heterosexual comrades; many more encountered tense silences at best, and harassment, derision, and exclusion at worst. Explaining how and why what I call the intimacy of organizing developed in these distinct spaces requires extensive oral histories supplemented by written sources and material artifacts.  Interviews with lesbian, gay male, and heterosexual activists provide the key to recovering personal experiences rarely documented in archival records. In these interviews -- both those which I have conducted and those generated by other scholars over the past 25 years -- narrators relate the detailed ways in which personal and professional relationships formed and either endured or withered within the tumult of social movement politics. Additionally, these interviews provide evidence of the experiences of rank and file activists not always documented in the broader historical literature. Critical readings of written sources (e.g. organizational records, diaries, autobiographies, pamphlets, mainstream and alternative newspapers) and material artifacts (e.g. cartoons, protest songs, buttons, posters), including their silences, will provide essential context for analyzing movement cultures. My research questions and methodologies are informed by recent scholarship on individual and collective acts of resistance and protest, by studies in women's history and queer history demonstrating the intrinsic interrelatedness of race, class, and gender, by new research into the historical ethnography of emotions, and by the suggestions of queer theory regarding the nature of homosocial and heterosocial relations.

Ultimately, the reception lesbian and gay male activists met in a given organization was directly related to the quality of the movement culture present. Some movement cultures, specifically those less reliant upon hierarchical forms of decision making and division of labor and those less dedicated to confirming their normalcy to a skeptical mainstream, provided spaces that fostered the development of personally and politically intimate movement cultures. Within such cultures, lesbian and gay male activists might develop sufficient self-respect and build confidence in their colleagues to "come out." The trust and candor built over time through the daily work of discussing, planning, and carrying out the business of social change provided some heterosexual activists the experiential knowledge necessary to challenge the dominant homophobic values and institutions.

A social movement's internal processes and external strategies inexorably shape each other. Given this, I use the experiences of lesbian and gay activists to evaluate the context within which activists working for social change made ideological and tactical decisions. The quality of democratic and sexual politics of movement cultures explains why activists were or were not able to recruit and retain support and achieve the change they sought. These organizations were attacked for challenging the values, institutions, and the political economies that allowed and perhaps encouraged the United States government to conduct the Vietnam War and other foreign interventions. The ways they then dealt with members of even more marginal groups who joined their organizations offers historical data to evaluate what ethical changes in social relations these groups could envision and thus work to achieve.

My introduction will review the experiences of lesbian and gay male peace activists before the Vietnam War era, notably those involved with the War Resisters League, a nonviolent direct action pacifist organization that has been active since the end of WWI; I will return to the experiences of WRL activists throughout the dissertation as appropriate. Chapter 2 covers the early years of campus activism against the Vietnam War, emphasizing the experiences of members of the Sixties' largest student organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Chapter 3 examines these issues within the context of the highly contested relations between liberals and radicals so vividly exposed by the 1967 and 1969 marches on Washington and the 1968 Democratic presidential campaigns and Chicago convention. Chapter 4 documents how the underground press of the late 1960s and early 1970s addressed homosexuality, with particular emphasis on the queer politics of the Liberation News Service. Chapter 5 reviews how local draft resistance movements, which multiplied throughout the nation in the late 1960s, were forced to address the demands of women and gay men unwilling to accept second-class citizenship within the movement. Chapter 6 takes readers to Cuba, where American lesbians and gay men on the Venceremos Brigades went to cut sugar cane and carry out the physical work the Revolution, only to encounter the virulent homophobia of Brigade organizers and the Cuban government. Chapter 7 will explore how activists of all orientations and behaviors adjusted to changes brought by the rise of gay liberation and the splintering of the New Left. When I revise the dissertation for publication, additional chapters will survey early 1970s local organizing (including third party efforts, GI and Vietnam veterans, the White Panther Party, and the back-to-the-land movements), lesbian-feminist peace activism of the 1970s and early 1980s (notably women's peace encampments and the Women's Pentagon Action), the 1982 Central Park disarmament rally, the anti-apartied and Central American solidarity movements, and ending with the Persian Gulf War.

As of February 2001, I have conducted over fifty interviews. Additionally, I have completed research trips to the Columbia Oral History Office, the Tamiment Library at NYU, New York Public Library, the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University, the Bentley Historical Library and the Labadie Collection (both at the University of Michigan), the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, the Washington State Historical Society, and the Special Collections Libraries at Amherst College, Northwestern University, the University of Washington, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina. I have completed the virtually all of of my dissertation research, though I have extensive plans for additional research when I revise the dissertation for publication.  I plan to defend the dissertation in late 2001 or early 2002.

Last revised: February 24, 2001.
© Ian Lekus, 1999-2001. All rights reserved.