Abstract: Children are oppressed classes and suffer under the rule of the patriarchal family system. Gay liberation organizations realized that children lost their autonomy under traditional families and were oppressed in various ways, and began to guide social movements to liberate children.
In 1972, members of Boston’s Gay Men’s Liberation, one of the most influential gay liberation organizations established after the Stone Wall riots three years ago (1969), drove to Miami to submit a declaration with ten demands at the Democratic National Convention (the full text is attached to the end of the article). With the intersection of new queer political consciousness, feminism and righteous indignation, this declaration came into being and expressed a utopian political vision. It covers a wide range of content and covers a wide range of areas that we now define LGBT politics. For example, its first requirement is to "stop any discrimination based on physiology. No government agency should record skin color, age, and gender. Physiological characteristics should never legally create any discrimination or privilege."
1970's "Home Liberation Day", Washington "Matthesin Association" members were on the streets of New York.
Image source: Timeline.com
Forty-five years have passed, and if many of the requirements of the gay liberation group are still controversial, most of them are still clearly distinguishable in today's political context: the organization tries to end American imperialism, prevent discrimination based on gender identity, and abolish the police system. Many radical leftists still have the above demands today. However, the sixth requirement in the declaration, even for many activists today, seems irresponsible, whimsical and somewhat dangerous, may cause social unrest:
Raising children should be a common responsibility of the entire society. Parents should be lifted from any legal rights to "their" children, and every child should choose their lives freely. Free full-day childcare centers should be established so that lesbians and gay people can share the responsibility of raising children.
set of sports? Liberate children legally? Queers help raise other people’s children and serve as role models and moral role models? When conservatives are wary of the “social engineering” of freedom under the Communist Red, isn’t they afraid of this queer version of the US where the Soviet daycare is located?
Or is it a utopia that liberates women from the burden of fertility, while creating a social structure in which children can act as independent individuals with confidence and will not be afraid or ashamed of exploring "sex"?
"Childhood" is a concept created by adult men to oppress women
There has been fierce debate about the nature of childhood at least since the eighteenth century. Are children naturally good, are they suitable for an open labor market, or are they needed standardized education? These issues have caused polarized views over the centuries, but most reformers have already agreed to varying degrees that children need protection from adults, and in exchange, they enjoy less fundamental rights.
No matter how progressive many of the previous reforms were, the children's liberation movement in the late 1960s was a huge breakthrough because it negated that children should be raised by parents. In the cultural context where adults (from hippie, radical feminists to civil rightsists or early homosexual equality) seek greater personal freedom, it may be only a matter of time before young people see themselves as (or identified as) oppressed minority and thus seek legal equality and liberation.
The radical nature of the 1960s makes us know that children's liberation is not an off-topic, but the core of controversy.Paul Goodman's best-selling book in 1960, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System proposed that children were the first victims of the rampage of capitalism; and in the same year, A.S. Neal's forward-looking education paper, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, proposed that children can make informed social and sexual choices as democratic actors, and that his school has educated them in this direction for many years, without any adverse effects.
The "Childhood Century: Social History of Family Life" by medieval historian Philip Asheye also caused a sensation when it was published in English in 1962. This book traces the detailed history of "childhood" in Western countries. proves that our modern concept of "childhood" - that is, children must be protected from the world - is just a social construction in recent years. The same is true for nuclear families. Ashiye said that in most years in history, except for the youngest children, other children lived like adults.
The book "Summer Mountain School" sold over 2 million from 1960 to 1970, and Goodman's "Growing Ridiculously" sold over 100,000 in the first few years of publication. The political language of children's liberation quickly replaced theory and conjecture. In the 1970s, at least 15 popular books promoted children's rights and children's emancipation of the mind, including David Gulibu's "Child Liberation" (1973), Beatrice and Ronald Gross's "Child Rights Movement: Overcoming the Oppression of Youth" (1977).
And when these ideas are combined with the emerging female liberation discourse, a more radical change takes place. For example, Shuramis Fisherson points out in his breakthrough book Dialectics of Gender (1970) that physiological reproduction itself is at the heart of female oppression and calls for new technologies to replace childbirth. In addition, she also believes that children are oppressed classes and suffer under the rule of the patriarchal family system. Felstone argues in the chapter "Defeat Childhood" that the emergence of the stage of "childhood" and the concept of "childhood innocence" are the construction created by adult men to strengthen oppression of women, which is also the function of the core family. Kate Millett In his 1984 paper "Beyond Politics: Children and Sex", further pointed out that children's oppression clearly stems from denying their sexual perception: "Sex itself is a sin for children. This is how adults control children and prohibit their sexual behavior. This concept has been passed down for many years and is extremely important to adults."
Gay Liberation Children
Happy Liberation Organization was inspired by Women Liberation Organization, and many people hope to add topics of childhood and pedagogy to their actions. However, they were at risk of being treated as pedophiles simply because of their theoretical interest in children; after all, most American middle-class people at the time still considered gay men to be perverts. Some gay writers have taken a stance, directly acknowledging the fact that most gays know while most heterosexuals try to desperately deny: gay children exist. Faced with all the misconceptions—that adult women and men “choose” to be homosexual or tempted by degenerate adults to be homosexual—gay liberators tell their own stories as gay children, and according to Kate Millett’s theory, sexual repression and lack of sexual knowledge are far more dangerous for adolescents than homosexual sexual behavior. Carl Witman, in the foundational gay Manifesto published a month before the Stone Wall Riot, wrote:
Note on Exploiting Children: Children can take good care of themselves and realize sex earlier than we are willing to admit.Those of us who started hunting for beauty in public in early adolescence know this. We are seeking pleasure, not being seduced by old perverts... As for the act of molesting children, most of them are done by straight men to little girls: this is not a problem unique to homosexuality, but caused by the frustration brought about by asceticism against physical pleasure.
Stone wall riots. Image source: Leonard Frank
Just talking about the existence of homophobia has impacted the core of homophobia. Adult gays say they have had special sexual desire when they are children. This type of testimony is a new development in the public's topic of homosexuality and a bold political strategy. In fact, in the context of an emerging child liberation movement, it is demonstrated that the existence of homosexual adolescents and children has had a direct impact on political organizations. Shortly after the Stone Wall riots, as homosexual liberation organizations spread across the country, adolescent queer people began to organize. In The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: 'An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail', 2008, Stephen L. Cohen recorded at least thirty organizations established and operated by the U.S. LGBT youth in the past decade.
More radical theorists argue that once people accept the idea that bourgeois families suppress children’s sexual behavior, the next logical step is to demand the end of the nuclear family and involve gay and lesbians in child care. Although the purity of its ideological nature may have made it a bit extreme, at that time, the extension of political movement to the field of parenting was not an interfering person. Other political movements are already dealing with issues like how to define children and their political status in the world. For example, the Black Panthers have established their own schools and extracurricular programs, as well as free breakfast programs, to participate in the existing public school system.
Mainstream and radical feminists set up feminist daycare centers. They also published children’s books that are not gender-discriminatory. The most famous ones include Marlow Thomas' 1972 illustration book and record "Free to Be . . You and Me", which encourages gender equality; and Charlotte Zolotto's 1972 picture book "William's Doll", in which a boy wants a doll as a gift, annoyed his father, who focuses on gender norms, because dolls are generally considered to be girls' toys.
The birth of a homosexual family
insists that lesbians can help raise children, a radical view to transforming traditional families, but its purpose is to shape children not only, but also to shape young people: many activists believe that their civil rights can be fully enjoyed only when they can participate in raising the next generation of society. But we also need to see objectively that for many years, adult queer children have been raising queer children who have been discovered by their families and run away from home, especially in gay settlements such as West Village in New York and San Francisco. Homeless queer children, whether they choose themselves or are forced by the environment, often flock to these neighborhoods, where they are often adopted by kind-hearted adults. For example, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970, setting up shelters for homeless transgender youth in Manhattan. In gay slang in the 1950s and 1960s, an older gay man would be called "mother" if he accepted the task of giving guidance or advice to a new young gay man.
Queer family composed of transgender Image source: "Photo" Stills
This is in line with the popular concept of "gay family" in the early 1970s: an extended one that does not have traditional family relationships, usually cross-generational friends support each other, just like a physiological family. Building a family in the community was crucial to the daily life of many LGBT people at that time, and to be honest, it was saving lives.This family vigor is evident in the late 1970s, when Sister Sledge's hit "We Are Family" immediately became a gay bar favorite and was often played as the final track for LGBT community dances and gay pride parades. During the AIDS epidemic, the need for gay families is even more urgent, as many native families abandon their sick sons, and traditional recuperation communities collapse.
In other words, gay people have been creating and raising families for years that offer many advantages over nuclear families—especially in terms of physical and emotional security. However, they do not want such families to be regarded as second-rate families anymore, and they want to free everyone from the brutal shackles of patriarchy and bourgeois values.
Practice of queer parenting
However, the requirements of gay liberation organizations have never been implemented. For how to perform actual operations, the authors of "ten points of requirements" often have only prototypes. Similarly, some male members of the New York Gay Liberation Front also left the organization, which they believed was not feminist enough and established the Revolutionary Effeminists. Historian Martin Duberman's 2018 analysis of the LGBT movement "Has the homosexual movement failed?" 》 wrote that gay feminists “consider gay men should also serve women, taking on traditional housework, including raising children, in order to promote the rise of female power. However, it seems that gay feminists have failed to put the theory into practice, and the members of this group have never expanded, so it quickly disappeared.
Nevertheless, on the local level, the practice of queer parenting occurs in a less radical way. In addition to the example of actual adoption of homosexuals mentioned above, some gay and heterosexual men in Boston in 1975 — who had no connection to gay liberation but may be inspired by their demands — formed Men’s Child Care Collective). While the organization is consciously shaped into a heterosexual/gay alliance, the very small amount of reports published about the organization always refer to it as a "gay parenting organization." This slip of tongue may illustrate the fact that the overwhelming majority of the organization is gay.
The organization meets at the Bromfield Street Education Foundation, 22 Bromfield Street, downtown Boston, where Gay Community News and Fag Rag (a branch of the Gay Liberation Organization) has its own offices. Most meetings are for awareness-raising, discussing how gay men become friends with heterosexual men and how to work together. And, as a progressive, feminist-oriented male organization, they also discuss helping women by sharing their child care work.
One specific project they carry out is setting up a day care group for women attending the Association for Alcohol Mutual Assistance in Cambridge. They also volunteer day care at LGBT and progressive political conferences. One of the focus of the organization is to provide child care to women who are marginalized or in difficult situations in various ways. Their feminist theory reflects both Some of the requirements of gay liberation groups, as well as concerns about class, economic and racial issues. Like many political groups, men’s child care lasted for several years. Later, members left Boston or participated in other projects, and the group dissolved.
, including San Francisco, Santa Cruz and New York, have similar organizations in cities across the country. These organizations have three goals. As feminists, members promise to relieve the burden on some women to take care of their children. They will also consciously oppose some restrictive gender roles, that men should not care for and raise children. Perhaps most importantly, they are determined to fight a deep-rooted myth through words and actions that homosexuals are child molesters.
Reset of the nuclear family
However, although these groups, including Boston Men's Parenting Association, are radical in concept, they also have a strange traditional side because they tend to place gay men in heterosexual relationships and make them temporary caregivers for their children. Most of the lesbians who cared for their children in the early 1970s were divorced. In a sense, the idea that lesbians or gay men raise their “own” children together will not begin to sprout in at least another decade. And when it appears, it usually follows rather than challenge the core family model of heterosexuality. What follows is that in homosexual equality activities, homosexual marriage is almost worshipfully preferred over all other goals. The goal of the radical gay liberation organization is to subvert the nuclear family, but instead it is this gay rights agenda, which gives the nuclear family a new life by reinjecting symbolic meaning and practical necessity into the nuclear family.
From 1977, the rise of the national conservative movement in the United States allowed Ronald Reagan to enter the White House. It also heralds the emergence of a highly organized “moral majority” movement (who are morally and religiously tough and conservative) that inject right-wing evangelical Protestant discourse into politics. Against this backdrop, anti-sex singer Anita Bryant provided the reason for “rescuing our children from homosexuality” when attacking an LGBT anti-discrimination bill. Bryant led the nationwide Save Our Children campaign, adopting harassment, abuse and brainwashing methods that have long left homosexuals deeply harmed by modern American history.
The homosexual equality movement no longer confronts these lies with facts, or at least with testimony from gay young people, but rather abandons all relationships with children and teenagers. The Gay Community Center is hesitant to sponsor gay youth groups. Society is indifferent to the discussion on legal adoption of children by gay and gay men and women. All discussions about bringing LGBT material into the classroom have been put on hold. Over the next few decades, political discussions moved from collective care for children, to homosexual families to marital equality in privatized nuclear families. In a larger political context, discussions about child liberation have also disappeared, instead protecting children from sexual assault, from "bad" audio, and from lurking predators.
protesters outside the U.S. Supreme Court.
Image source: Timeline.com
In recent decades, the struggle for equality in marriage has been crucial to the success of the homosexual equality movement. However, for those of us who recall the days when we were political vision and vitality and the potential for radical change, this victory was mixed. Replacing traditional heterosexual families with same-sex nuclear families does not necessarily eradicate the structural problems that are very harmful to this system. The strategies and theoretical approaches of children by Gay Liberation Organizations are a complex political issue. Some of them are practical, others are whimsical, but their motivations are the desire to take care of children seriously and the desire to completely break the oppressive family structure. By heart, these various movements—from proving the existence of homosexual children, to caring for children, to undermining the legal framework that allows parents to “own” their children—are not only an attempt by homosexual liberation organizations to reshape the world, but also a cure the harm that society has done to homosexuals over decades, especially the native families of homosexuals.
For more than half a century, this healing has moisturized things silently in many ways. A surprising number of young people are increasingly revealing their homosexual identities. And discussions about sexual behavior and gender roles for queer youth are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic. As the gay liberation movement in 1972 began to imagine, the children are all fine now and they take good care of themselves.
Original link:
http://bostonreview.net/gender-sexuality/michael-bronski-when-gays-wanted-liberate-children
Attachment:
Boston gay liberation organization's "Ten Points Manifesto":
Boston gay liberation Front urges the following principles to be included in the 1972 Democratic Party Program:
1. We demand that all physiological discrimination be ended. No government agency should record skin color, age and gender. Physiological characteristics should never be the basis for any particular legal discrimination or privilege.
2. We ask that all discrimination based on sexual orientation be stopped. Everyone should be free to obtain sexual satisfaction without worrying about being raped. The government should neither legitimize or illegalize these forms of satisfaction. No one should be restricted in movement (whether immigration or exit), employment, housing or otherwise because they are gay.
3. The US government should not only end discrimination against clothing habits, but also actively encourage more imaginative dressing. Members of any armed forces or other government agencies should not be forced to wear “uniforms” to match biological gender or hierarchy. For example, if he/she likes, women should be allowed to keep short hair and wear trousers; while men can keep long hair and wear dresses.
4. All economic discrimination against gay and lesbians should be stopped. We should not be deprived of employment or promotion opportunities because of our sexual orientation or dressing habits. We should enjoy the same tax benefits as heterosexuals living in nuclear families. We should also have as much food, housing, medical services and transportation as everyone can live a fulfilling and beneficial life. We specifically support the provision of $5,500 in basic income to each person and we call for the reallocation of national wealth. Resources and power must be taken away from white heterosexual men and redistributed to everyone.
5. We call for the suspension of all government (or other) research on "gay". Our sexual orientation is not a disease; all chemical, shock or hypnotic “therapeutics” to “cure” homosexuality should be illegal. Government funds for “mental health” now should be given to gay and gay men and other “mental ill” groups so that they can be organized in counseling and community centers to meet their needs.
6. Raising children should be the shared responsibility of the entire community. Any legal rights of parents to “their” children should be lifted, and every child should be free to choose their own destiny. A free 24-hour childcare center should be established where lesbians and gay men share the responsibility for raising children.
7. Now all gay and gay men and women who are imprisoned for any “sex crime” (except rape) should be released immediately from the imprisonment room, mental hospital or prison. He/they deserve compensation of $2.50 per hour of imprisonment; all imprisonment records should be destroyed. A gay and lesbian person imprisoned for other charges shall be exempted from being assaulted and raped by a jailer or inmate; no one shall be deprived of the right to be promptly released or parole for engaging in “homosexual conduct” during lockdown.
8. We call for the cessation of all purposeful aggression forces. We support the seven-point peace plan of the Vietnamese people and call on all the United States and its support for the complete withdrawal of the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy units from Vietnam. Furthermore, we call on all U.S. troops to return to the U.S. territory as the most effective way to end U.S. imperialism.
9. In the United States, we request the dissolution of all armed forces, secret police (FBI, CIA, IRS, anti-drug teams, etc.) and uniformed police. Weapons should be used only to protect people and prevent rape. To this end, we call for the establishment of a people’s police agency, composed of those who are now most vulnerable to police brutality: Third World groups, women, lesbians and poor.
10. We require that all peoples have the right to self-governance and self-determination regardless of country, gender, party, race, age or other artificially imposed categories. Our liberation movement is still unfinished as long as anyone becomes the property or slave of others in any way. All power and rule must end, and an equal system must be established. We must jointly seek new forms of cooperation.
This article and the cover image were first published on Yitudou. Please contact Tudou for content authorization when reprinting.
Author: Michael Bronski
Translation: Qiyin
Edit: xd Targaryen
Beauty editor: Prince Leopard
