Lillian Faderman on 'The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle'

Internationally respected scholar Lillian Faderman delivers another impressive tome to her literary fans, "The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle." The book covers the 1950s to the present struggle for gay, lesbian and transgender rights.

Told through dramatic accounts of passionate struggles of our community, the book is based on rigorous research gained from more than 150 interviews. It paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movements, and is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind. EDGE sat down with Faderman and asked her ten questions about her epic new book.

EDGE: You came of age in the middle of the gay rights movement. What strikes you most about how things were at that time?

Faderman: I actually came of age long before the real gay rights movement; I came out in 1956 as a teenager, and those were really the bad old days. Every aspect of society was against us, certainly the church; the government, because homosexuality was equated with subversion, and they were blackmail-able. Russians could come over to seduce women into giving away state secrets. Psychologists thought we were sick, cops said we were lawbreakers, everything that was happening in 1956 really made people LGBTs feel that we were pariahs. I didn't even know when I came out of the existence of Daughters of Bilitis or the Mattachine Society; I later found out. But what happened with Stonewall in 1969 really was, as one gay wit coined, 'The hairpin drop heard round the world.' It became an icon for LGBT people, who were demanding their rights.

EDGE: Did you ever expect to see same-sex marriage legalized?

Faderman: Never; it would have been a joke in the gay girls bars I used to hang out at. It was never conceivable that the President of United States would say gay or lesbian easily and positively, or that society would change its opinion in such a dramatic way in what seems such a few years. The attempts to organize began in the 1950s and 1970s, and became intensified and spread all across country. This battle has been going on for 70 years, but certainly since the early 1970s. Finally in the last few years, we've seen phenomenal successes.

EDGE: How do you think this will impact the future of the LGBT community? Are we dinosaurs now?

Faderman: No. I think there is a huge amount of diversity in the community. Some people are going to want to get married and assimilate, while others remain on the fringes of society, and call themselves queer rather than LGBT. They will reject the trappings of middle-class citizenship.

EDGE: Do you think AIDS brought cohesion to our community, even as it decimated it?

Faderman: I do. I absolutely do, and it's one point I hope I make clearly and dramatically in the book. Lesbians in the '70s identified as lesbian feminists rather than gay, and some were separatists. Many made a real split with the gay male community, with hostility because they felt gay men enjoyed the same privileges as straight men, with women as a second class. With the AIDS epidemic, lesbians felt this was a matter of life and death, and many played prominent roles helping gay men, help to fight AIDS and get funding, or just giving humanitarian assistance to PWAs.

In some ways, it brought lesbians and gay men together in a way they had not had in the '70s. It also made more people come out, many not willingly because it became impossible to hide the worse symptoms, but many more came out out of sympathy, realizing it was matter life or death, so to hell with society's prejudices.

I think in addition, it made families of gay men realize that those who had AIDS were someone they loved who was dying, and they had to do away with their prejudices and offer love and nurturance. Then it did something else: it created a wonderful militancy in some parts of the gay community to demand that the government pay attention and put money into fighting AIDS. The CDC finally did meet with men in ACT UP, and change the protocol on testing because of that meeting. It was a devastating, awful disease but it did bring the communit =y together in ways it was not unified before.

EDGE: Why are lesbians, who played such a big role in this epidemic, invisible in gay history at this time?

Faderman: It depends on where you are looking. I know Ann Northrup worked with the media committees of ACT UP. Certainly there are documents that show that lesbians were very active, nurturance and protesting against the lack of government funding. But I think if you ask the average person who fought against AIDS, they would probably not know of the history of lesbians in this struggle.

EDGE: Why is now the perfect time for a book on the history of the Gay civil rights movement?

Faderman: It's not that we have finally arrived at absolute, first-class American citizenship. We still have enemies out there, as Republicans make clear every day. But so much has been achieved -- beyond my wildest dreams when I was a young person coming out as a lesbian, into a frightened community. And it is such a dramatic story of the struggle to achieve what we have achieved. Gradually it got better and better, and we won society over to our side -- obviously not all of America, but 60 percent said in 2011 that they approved of same-sex marriage.

EDGE: Why did you choose to tell this history through stories, rather than just dry facts?

Faderman: Because I think the stories make the history. The dry facts are there; I don't avoid facts, but the stories are of individuals and organized groups that really got us to this much-improved point we are at today. The facts are there, but are not as interesting as the struggles of individuals and their remarkable successes. I wanted to honor those people that were so important in what we achieved.

EDGE: You also devote chapters to gays in the military. Should gays be clamoring to be in this patriarchal war-mongering institution?

Faderman: We got the ban lifted on serving in military, which was so terrible, because Don't Ask, Don't Tell was supposed to be an improvement, but in some ways was even worse in terms of witch hunting after Clinton signed it into law. I remember the Gay Pride parade in San Francisco after the official lifting of the ban, and it was absolutely wonderful to see members of the military marching in uniform, holding the insignias of their branch in a Gay Pride parade. It was totally beyond my imagination.

But whether we should be part of it is a good question I alluded to before. What I try to make clear in the the book is that, even from the beginning with Harry Hay and the Mattachine Society, there were conflicts about what it meant to be gay. There are gay Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, and communists. The very first 'national convention' in the 'homophile' movement in 1953 battled over whether gay people were different from the rest of society by virtue of being gay, or if the only difference between them and the straight world was the insignificant difference of who they loved.

The point is, there has always been a great diversity of who we are. I think the only thing that the so-called LGBT community ever had in common is our common enemies -- people who hate all of us by virtue of the fact that we're different. The organizations and movements that succeeded best were those that recognized we're different, but came together anyway to fight that common enemy. That's how they defeated the Briggs Initiative in California, by getting the suits and the radicals to work together to appeal to different groups.

We are as diverse as the heterosexual community, ethnically, racially, class, and lifestyle. So yes, some of us wonder should we really want to be part of the war machine, while others think it's our patriotic duty to serve our country.

EDGE: Is transgender rights the next big movement? What about LGBT youth?

Faderman: Certainly those things are important, but in terms of the next big step by law, it's the Equality Act. In 1974, Congresswoman Bella Abzug and Ed Koch both tried to introduce an "Equality Act" that would add LGBT community to the Civil Rights Act. They tried in '74 and '75, and couldn't get traction either time. It would have covered LGBT people the same way it does racial and ethnic minorities, women and the handicapped. We still don't have that kind of protection; that needs to be the next step in terms of law. There is very little chance of it passing in a Republican congress, but eventually it will, and we need to advocate for sweeping legislation.

EDGE: What kind of history do you think they will write about the LGBT community 40 years from now? Is our history as a community over now?

Faderman: No, it's not! We will certainly continue to have common enemies that will unite us. You can see it in the Republican primary field! At the end of the book, I got to add the June 26 results of the Supreme Court decision, and I talk briefly about the backlash that followed immediately. The Religious Right continues to be crazy on the issue, and will continue to try and find ways to take away the rights we've won. The evidence of it is what almost happened in Indiana and Arkansas.

Same-sex marriage was legalized in Indiana, and the Religious Right wanted to make sure they didn't have to honor it, so they pressured the state legislature to pass a Religious Freedom Act. Gov. Mike Pence said he would sign it into law, but the response by the gay community and allies was absolutely fantastic. The National College Basketball said they'd pull out, Audra McDonald said she wouldn't sing in Indianapolis... the point is, the Right is going to keep trying to find ways to sabotage our rights. We have enough allies to fight them, but we're going to have to keep fighting into the foreseeable future, because it's clear they're not going to give in to us easily.