When gays wanted to liberate children

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In 1972 members of Boston's Gay Men's Liberation, one of the most significant Gay Liberation groups formed after the 1969 Stonewall riots, drove to Miami to hand out a ten-point list of demands at the Democratic National Convention. Emerging from a crucible of new queer political consciousness, feminism, and rage, the manifesto (reproduced at the bottom of this article) articulated a utopian political vision that was broad - today, we might say intersectional - extending far beyond what we would now conceptualize as LGBT politics. Its first demand, for example, was for "an end to any discrimination based on biology. Neither skin color, age nor gender should be recorded by any government agency. Biology should never be the basis for any special legal handicap or privilege."

If many of Gay Men's Liberation's demands remain controversial forty-five years later, most are also still legible in today's political discourse: the group sought to end U.S. imperialism, prevent discrimination based on sexual identity, and abolish the police. These all remain live demands of many radicals on the left. Demand six, however, is likely to strike even many of today's activists as irresponsible, bizarre, and dangerous: ["]Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over 'their' children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. Free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing.["] [...]

Even recalling what we know about the radical nature of the 1960s, it can be difficult to appreciate that child liberation was not a fringe idea. Paul Goodman's bestselling 1960 Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System proposed that children were among the first casualties of capitalism run amok, while A. S. Neill's progressive education treatise of the same year, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, proposed not only that children could function as democratic actors and make sensible social and sexual choices, but that his school had already been facilitating this for years, to no ill effect. [...]

Consequently, Anita Bryant's attack on a LGBT antidiscrimination bill that would have protected homosexual teachers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, was explicitly articulated in terms of protecting children. Leading a national "Save Our Children" crusade, Bryant drew on the longstanding tropes of molestation, abuse, and indoctrination that had plagued homosexuals throughout modern U.S. history. Rather than confront these lies with facts or, better yet, the testimony of queer young people, the gay rights movement backed away from any connections to children and teens. Gay community centers were hesitant to sponsor gay youth groups. There was a chilling effect on discussions of gay men or lesbians legally adopting children. Any discussions of introducing LGBT materials into the classroom were put on hold. Over the next decades political discussions moved from collective care of children, and extended gay families, to the privatized same-sex nuclear family of marriage equality. In the larger political context, discussions of children's liberation also vanished, replaced by talk of protecting children from sex, from "dangerous" music and video cultures, and lurking predators.

The fight for marriage equality has been crucial to the success of gay rights in recent decades. It, however, is a decidedly mixed victory for those of us who recall the visionary political exuberance, and potential of radical change, of earlier days. Replacing the traditional heterosexual family with its same-sex analogue will not necessarily eliminate any of the profoundly damaging structural problems of the institution. [...]

In many ways this healing has, over half a century, been slowing occurring. Amazing numbers of young people are coming out earlier and earlier. Discussions of queer youth sexuality - and gender roles - are increasingly sophisticated and vibrant. In ways that Gay Liberation began to imagine in 1972, the kids are all right; they are taking care of themselves.

source: Article 'When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children' by Michael Bronski; bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/michael-bronski-when-gays-wanted-liberate-children; Boston Review; 8 June 2018