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“It is categories in the mind and guns in their hands which keep us enslaved.” — LARRY MITCHELL , The Faggots and Their Friends between Revolutions, 1977
“…political repression of pornography and alternate sexualities peaked during the Great Depression and through the two decades following the Second World War; however, this same period generated the “vanguard” of a particular form of “homosexual freedom,” argues Andrew Sullivan in Virtually Normal, “despite its tradition of fundamentalist Christianity, despite its capitalist system, despite its allegedly oppressive influence in world culture.”
“With significant national variations, intimate arrangements under late capitalism now display a variegated pattern of precarity: informal coupling, serial marriage, delayed marriage, and single life.
Parenting has been delinked from pairing. This pattern, Göran Therborn writes, is “remarkably synchronized across the Western part of the continent, and even across the oceans, including the North American and Pacific New Worlds, and at least parts of Latin America, such as Argentina and Venezuela.” In retrospect, nothing appears to have been historically “normal” about middle-class nuclear family norms; these were quite extraordinary.”
“During the postwar period, gays and lesbians struggled against the censorship of lifestyle magazines, pornography, films, and pulp novels. They forged political alliances with neighborhood businesses and other minority groups to oppose police brutality and raids on bars and other public spaces. State repression galvanized a political consciousness known to no other period in the existence of such institutions.”
“..As developmentalist states encouraged and promoted middle-class nuclear-family norms in order to facilitate working populations’ adjustment to more demanding labor processes, it’s not so surprising that this hegemony should break apart during a period of flexible employment, declining real wages, debt-fueled consumption, and successive asset bubbles.”
“Two great fertility declines—the first, accompanying industrialization and the French and American Revolutions, and a second, corresponding to the postwar developmentalist state and anticolonial movements—index the global impact of emancipatory movements in terms of increasing sexual freedom and life options.”
“Urban, interclass cultures of sex and intimacy between men flourished at the historic centers of the early modern capitalist world system: Florence and Venice in the fourteenth century, the United Provinces and London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Paris and other great cities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”
“A relationship of sexual hegemony exists wherever sexual norms benefiting a dominant social group shape the sexual conduct and self-understandings of other groups, whether or not they also stand to benefit from such norms and whether or not they can achieve them.”
“How has sexual anarchy propped up such dominant groups and institutions by enhancing their prestige? How has marriage functioned to transmit property—and thus, the social dominance of one class over another—from generation to generation? How have the formation and dissolution of sexual hegemonies been politically and economically necessary despite whatever moral hackles they raised?”
“Benjamin’s articulation of the relation between political form and temporal models helps explain why contemporary sexual history has tended to favor a progressive, unilinear temporality. As the historian Dagmar Herzog points out, this literature was mostly written during the late twentieth- century ascendance of a “liberalization paradigm,” which presumes “the gradual overcoming of obstacles to sexual freedom” but “leaves us with few tools for making sense of moments of renewed sexual conservatism.”
“Was there an actual basis for such perceptions? How did the regulation of these cultures effectively prop up a formation of sexual hegemony favoring middle-class norms? How was sexuality different before the rise of national bourgeoisies?”