The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization

Abstract

Scholars and activists often assume that liberationism is the originating and guiding force in the gay and lesbian movement in the US. In fact, liberationism was but an ‘episode’ in the late 1960s and then again in the early 1990s. The abiding reality has been a politics centered on rights, identity normalization, pride, and social integration, or what we simply call a politics of normalization. Curiously, and perhaps expressing the above normative position, the research literature tends to ignore this rather stunning reality; instead researchers seem more disposed to explaining the waning of liberationism and lesbian feminism and their sustaining cultural force. With a few exceptions, social scientists have only recently addressed the social movement debates. We are encouraged by the promising and important research of sociologists and others. However, much of this recent social movement research has been one-sidedly social structural. In this article, we sketch a culturalist account of the ascendance of a normalizing politics 1 . We introduce the notion of a cultural code, specifically ‘civic individualism’, to explain something of the abiding historical presence of this politics. We trace this politics from the 1950s to the 1990s where ‘mainstream’ gay and lesbian politics has often relied on a moral language of virtue and authenticity.