Introduction

Roland Emmerich's 2015 film Stonewall purports to tell the story of that eventful day of the gay uprising at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, doing so with a not so agreeable twist. Rather than basing the story on the racially and ethnically diverse group of queens who started the uprising, the film makes a young cisgender white man named Danny the origin and center of that fateful day. According to The Guardian's entertainment writer Nigel Smith, Emmerich “defended both his narrative decisions and choice of lead, saying that he'd made the movie for as wide an audience as possible, and that ‘straight-acting’ Danny was an ‘easy in’ for heterosexual viewers” (Smith, 2015). There were apparently other “easy in's” for the film as well. It was “easy” to cast the queens as pre-political sirens who erupted only after Danny prompted them. It was also “easy” to imagine that the riots began with only heterosexist oppression in mind, this despite the fact that Danny leads the crowd in a chant of “Gay Power,” a category that could only exist because of the nearness of the black revolution.

In his review, Smith noted that even the trailer for the film “worried many with what appeared to be a ‘whitewashed’ take on a diverse group of people,” with some calling for a boycott of the film. Despite the appropriate disapproval that critics heaped onto the film, Emmerich's Stonewall was actually following a convention long in the making. In fact, we might say that the film and its narrative of Stonewall are part of the casualties not only of the mainstreaming of Stonewall but of gay liberation itself.

For the longest time we have believed that queer liberation arose as a single-issue event that was simply about sexuality. Hence, we have told ourselves that queer politics came to issues of race, colonization, incarceration, and capitalism later in its development. This book tells a different story, one in which a multidimensional host of concerns were there from the very beginning only to be excised later on. In fact, since the late sixties – from the Stonewall uprisings even – the intersectional interests of gay liberation expressed a politics that would try to relate issues of sexuality, race, class, and gender to one another. Hence, part of the book locates gay liberation within a political and intellectual context that was trying to find ways for various struggles to join forces, noting that gay liberation actually emerged out of those efforts of affiliation. One-Dimensional Queer goes on to show that multidimensional and intersectional interests were overtaken by single-issue formulations of queer politics, formulations that would promote liberal capitalist ideologies. Hence, as a multidimensional gay politics transitioned to a single-issue and one-dimensional platform, the meaning of freedom for queer and transgender folks and minorities, in general, shifted radically.

As a critique of the dominant way of narrating queer political histories, the book problematizes the presumption that gay liberation was always and already a single-issue politics. It does so by taking inspiration from the work of groups such as the Gay Liberation Front, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, the Combahee River Collective, Third World Gay Revolution, Gay Latino Alliance, DYKETACTICS! and so on. Challenging the presumption that intersectional activism among queers is a recent phenomenon, the book instead argues that such political models were not recent at all but constitutive of the political aspirations of “early” gay liberation.

As intersectional activists, gay liberationists were putting to use the political discourses that were being crafted by various progressive struggles, discourses that took the relational nature of progressive struggles as the basis of political interventions. Part of the relational politics involved an interest in disrupting the liberal notion that forms of difference are inherently antagonistic to each other, that difference itself was a source of separation and antagonism. The book, therefore, is an observance of what Audre Lorde called the “institutionalized rejection of difference” (Lorde, 2007, p. 115).

The one-dimensionality of queerness

The book's title and inquiry are taken from Herbert Marcuse's classic 1964 text One-Dimensional Man. Like this one, Marcuse's book tried to comprehend the ideological foundations that allowed industrial society to proceed without opposition. For Marcuse, the repressions of industrial society were qualitatively different from the repressions in other forms of society. As he put it, “This repression, so different from what characterized the preceding, less developed stages of our society, operates today not from a position of natural and technical immaturity but rather from a position of strength” (Marcuse, 1991, p. xlii). Describing how industrial society achieves ideological dominance, he argued, “Technical progress, extended to a whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospects of freedom from toil and domination” (Marcuse, 1991, p. xliv). Here, Marcuse pointed to how the technical resources of industrial society are maneuvered to disqualify opposition, the result of which is a society in which “former antagonists” are united in an “overriding interest in the preservation and improvement of the institutional status quo” (Marcuse, 1991, p. xlv).

One-Dimensional Queer is similarly concerned with how incorporating queerness into US state discourse and American capitalism was aided by a single-issue articulation of queer politics. In doing so, the book casts a critical eye on the presumed signs of gay progress – the extension of rights to queers and the inclusion of queers within capitalist economic visions. For Marcuse, one-dimensionality represented the containment of social change inasmuch as technical progress was seen as providing people in society with everything that they needed. In the context of the normalization of queerness, one-dimensionality designates the containment of social change inasmuch as the mainstreaming of gay identity and sexuality (i.e. grooming them for the needs of state and capital) are understood to be signs of social progress.

For Marcuse, one-dimensionality denoted people's surrender to the given social and institutional landscape, a surrender that was part of the very intention of advanced industrial society. Describing this ethos, he argued, “Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing social change – qualitative change which would establish essentially different institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human existence. This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society” (Marcuse, 1991, p. xliv). From Marcuse, we get a sense of one-dimensionality as the conflation of state and capital's needs with personal needs, the understanding of capitalist logics as the epitome of reason, the systematic and deliberate negation of social alternatives, and the acquiescence to the given social and institutional order. This book attempts to show how the mainstreaming of gay liberation attempted to turn queerness into an endorsement of state and capital as the satisfiers of queer needs, as the incarnations of reason, and as the reasons to make peace with the world that capitalism helped to bring about.

The threat of the multidimensional

If one-dimensionality, according to Marcuse, identified those social processes that attempt to restrict social transformations, countering one-dimensionality meant producing people and collectivities that “[refuse] to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation” (Marcuse, 1991, p. xliii). Critical theory was part of that enterprise of refusal. As Marcuse argued, “To investigate the roots of these developments and examine their historical alternatives is part of the aim of a critical theory of contemporary society, a theory which analyzes society in the light of its used and unused or abused capabilities for improving the human condition” (Marcuse, 1991, p. xlii).

This book attempts to show how intersectional and multidimensional queer struggles (i.e. ones that addressed the overlaps between differences of race, class, gender, and transgender) were key ingredients of that refusal. As the book will show, groups such as Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Third World Gay Revolution, the Combahee River Collective, and DYKETACTICS! offered analyses of interlocking and intersecting oppressions as provocations for “improving the human condition” and imagining new kinds of peoples and collectivities. Such groups represent the historical evidence of queer and trans capacities to think and live beyond the gender, sexual, racial, and class prescriptions of the world that we have inherited.

In an effort to show how those capacities were regulated and suppressed, the book attempts to show how the intersectional and multidimensional aspects of gay liberation suffered a backlash by single-issue political...