Abstract
Queer youth were an integral part of the gay liberation movement as it crystallized across the Anglo-American world. From Australia to the United Kingdom to Canada, queer youth were not simply placard carriers or supportive bystanders. They were intelligent readers and skilled writers who made important contributions to gay liberation periodicals throughout the 1970s. In this chapter, Scott de Groot draws on oral history interviews and archival research to show that queer youth occupy a distinctive but largely unappreciated place in gay liberation’s intellectual and communications history. In a methodologically significant vein, de Groot demonstrates that gay liberation periodicals constitute an invaluable resource for studying queer youth as sexual subjects and political agents rather than as merely objects of adult discourse.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
“A Program for Gay Liberation.” The Body Politic, 1 (November–December 1971).
“A Sixteen Year Old Speaks Out.” Gay Lib News (June 1973).
Adam, B. D. The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Altman, D. Defying Gravity: A Political Life. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997.
Altman, D. “Liberation, Education, and the Homosexual.” Sydney Gay Liberation Press, 3 (September 1974).
Altman, D. The End of the Homosexual? St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2013.
An 18 year old boy. “Conveyor Belt Sex.” Gay News, 4 (1972).
Andrews, R. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006.
Angelides, S. A History of Bisexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Bass, J. “Libraries Booked.” The Body Politic, 31 (1977).
Bayly, C. A., S. Beckert, M. Connelly, I. Hofmeyr, W. Kozol, and P. Seed. “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History.” The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441–64.
Beeymn, B. “The Silence Is Broken: A History of the First Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Student Groups.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 2 (April 2003): 205–23.
Bell, T. “School’s Leaflet Revisited.” Sydney Gay Liberation Newsletter, 9 (July 1973).
Bennett, J. C. The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Berlandt, K. “Don’t Call Us We’ll Call You.” Gay Sunshine 1, no. 3 (November 1970).
Bev. “Parents as Bullies.” Gay Sunshine 1, no. 3 (November 1970).
Bieritz, L. “I Came Out in Class!” Growing Up Gay: A Youth Liberation Pamphlet. Ann Arbor, MI: Youth Liberation, 1976.
Churchill, D. S. “Transnationalism and Homophile Political Culture in the Postwar Decades.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 1 (2009): 31–65.
Churchill, W. Homosexual Behavior Among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967.
Cohen, S. L. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail’. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Cook, M, and H. Bauer, eds. Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Post-war Years. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
“Dear Jocelyn and John.” Melbourne Gay Liberation Newsletter, 15 (May 1975).
de Groot, S. “Out of the Closet and into Print: Gay Liberation Across the Anglo-American World.” PhD thesis, Queen’s University, 2015.
D’Emilio, J. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Doty, A. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Drucker, D. J. The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
Duder, C. Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900–65. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.
Edelstein, I. “Gay Youth Liberation.” Come Out! 1, no. 4 (June–July 1970).
Fetterly, J. The Resistant Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1981.
Floyd, K. “Rethinking Reification: Marcuse, Psychoanalysis, and Gay Liberation.” Social Text 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 103–128.
Floyd, K. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Foss, P. “Are You a Poofter?” Sydney Gay Liberation Newsletter, 8 (February–May 1973).
Fraser, N. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by C. Calhoun. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1992.
Friskney, J. B., and C. Gerson. “Writers and the Market for Fiction and Literature.” In History of the Book in Canada: Volume Three, 1918–1980, edited by C. Gerson and J. Michon, 131–38. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Gallo, M. M. Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement. New York: Caroll & Graf, 2006.
“Gay Lib Goes to Denby High School.” Gay Liberator (December 1970).
“Gay Liberation Front Youth Group.” Come Together, 6 (1971).
Gay Sunshine 1, no. 2 (October 1970).
“GLF Battles with Education Departments.” Gay News, 61 (1974).
Gross, L., and J. D. Woods, eds. The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Harvey, D. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.
Horsman, R. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Jackson, L. “Childhood, Youth and Sexuality.” In Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, edited by H. G. Cocks and M. Houlbrook. Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.
Jagose, A. Queer Theory. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1996.
Lipton, M. “Queer Readings of Popular Culture: Searching to (Out) the Subtext.” In Queer Youth Cultures, edited by Susan Driver, 163–80. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008.
Luey, B. “The United States 1890–1970.” In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 368–80. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
McKay, I., and J. Swift. Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012.
McMillan, J. Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Meeker, M. Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s–1970s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Memmi, A. The Colonizer and the Colonized. New York: Orion Press, 1965.
Milligan, D. “A Wilde Eyed Radical.” Gay Liberator, 34 (February 1974).
Milligan, D. “Oscar Wilde.” Gay Marxist, 3 (October 1973).
Moore, N. The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books. St. Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2012.
Morrison, I. “The History of the Book in Australia.” In The Book: A Global History, edited by Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woundhuysen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Myerson, Z. “Focus On: Boston’s Gay Youth.” Gay Community News 2, no. 10 (August 31, 1974).
Newton, E. Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Paulinellie, C. S. “A Lonely Teen.” Gay Community News 4, no. 38 (March 19, 1977).
Powers, J. “Gay Youth Organizing: Toronto.” The Body Politic 3 (March–April 1972).
Przevalaski, B. “Message from an Average, Everyday High School Activist.” Gay Community News 3, no. 18 (November 1, 1975).
Reynolds, R. From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2002.
Robinson, P. The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Robinson, P. The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Rowbotham, S. Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It. London: Pluto Press, 1973.
Russell, B. Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects. edited by P. Edwards. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957.
Rutherford, P. A World Made Sexy: Freud to Madonna. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Sedgwick, E. K. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angles: University of California Press, 1990.
Sequoya. “High Schools Rip Off Gays.” Gay Liberator (March 1971).
Shelley, M. “Gay Is Good.” In We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, edited by M. Blasius and S. Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Spiers, H. “On His Way: Letters from a Small Town Youth.” The Body Politic, 12 (March–April 1974).
Spivak, G. C. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Squires, C. “The History of the Book in Britain from 1914.” In The Book: A Global History, edited by M. F. Suarez and H. R. Woundhuysen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Stein, M. City of Brotherly and Sisterly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Streitmatter, R. Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Suleri, S. The Rhetoric of British India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
“The Two Ages of Faggotry: Young and Gay.” Fag Rag, 4 (January 1973).
“To Be 19 and Gay.” Fag Rag, 1 (June 1971).
Vucetic, S. The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Wainwright, D. F. “I Won’t Wait.” Gay News, 61 (1974).
Warner, M. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005.
Weeks, J. Making Sexual History. London: Polity, 2000.
Wilt, J. “Desperately Seeking Verena: A Resistant Reading of ‘The Bostonians’.” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 293–316.
Wittman, C. “A Gay Manifesto.” In Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young. New York: Douglas, 1972.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
de Groot, S. (2021). “We Will Never Betray You, Brothers and Sisters”: Queer Youth and the Intellectual History of Gay Liberation Across the Anglo-American World. In: Marshall, D. (eds) Queer Youth Histories. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56550-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56550-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-56549-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56550-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)