Activist, Gay
From Homolexis Glossary
Familiar in the 1970s, the expression gay activist has become less common owing to the ebbing of the strenuous and utopian aspects of the gay liberation movement, which attained a pinnacle in those years. The label served to denote someone choosing to devote a major share of his or her energies to the accomplishment of social change that will afford a better life for all GLBT people.
In Europe the term variations of gay militant tended to be preferred, but in North America the word militant is generally eschewed because of its dated Old Left flavor (“Communist Party militant”).
The history of the activist meme displays a complicated pedigree. Rudolph Eucken, who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906, developed a philosophy of Aktivismus. At this time many figures of Germany's political and literary-artistic avant-garde were drawn to Franz Pfemfert's periodical Die Aktion (1911-32). Further permutations occurred with the Flemish nationalists in Belgium and the Hungarian artistic movement, Aktivismus, that arose in the aftermath of World War I. As early as 1915, however, Kurt Hiller, a political theorist and journalist, as well as an advocate of homosexual rights, drew several strands together in his broader concept of Aktivismus, urging the intelligentsia to abandon ivory tower isolation and participate fully in political life.
The Gay Activists Alliance appeared in New York City in December 1969 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots. Exiles from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), its organizers sought to form a nonviolent "politically neutral, militant organization." Their goal was to "secure basic human rights, dignity and freedom for all gay people." As the energies of gay liberation converged, the group provided a model for the single-issue approach. This stood in contrast with GLF’s umbrella concept, which sought alliances with all “progressive” groups. Tactically GAA members innovated by performing zaps, surprise acts of confrontation with unresponsive media, hostile business firms, and public officials deemed homophobic.
New York’s Gay Activists published the Gay Activist newspaper until 1980. In 1974 arsonists had burned down their New York City headquarters, the Firehouse on Wooster Street in Greenwich Village. In October 1981 GAA disbanded, signaling the end of the gay-liberation era and a new one dominated by AIDS/HIV. Appropriately, gay health issues generated their own form of activism.
Recently, the controversial terms legal activism and judicial activism have come to the fore with regard to the movement to secure gay-marriage rights. Some gay spokespeople and their allies oppose the very concept of activist judges. They hold that the concept is inappropriate because in our legal system judges are accorded the power of review over all laws to determine whether they conform to the Constitution (whether state or federal). The law is what they agree it is. In that sense, either all judges are "activists" or none are. Conservatives take a very different view. When they castigate judicial activism, they are highlighting the discovery of new rights previously not detected in the Constitution—or at most resident there only in terms of “emanations and penumbras.” Conservatives typically presume that stipulating something of that kind—that is, granting a right that has always largely prohibited or to taking away a right that has been widely enjoyed--ought to be done by the legislature. Not by judges.
And here we come to the constitutional right, recognized by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in November 2003, for persons of the same sex to marry each other. Subsequently, many gay-marriage advocates have come to understand that such court intervention may be counterproductive in that it tends to provoke a backlash. At most, the courts should decree civil unions or the equivalent. In this view, gay marriage proper should be instituted by a vote of the state legislature or by an initiative subject to the vote of the people.
