"The Politics of Being Queer" is a 1969 essay by Paul Goodman on the connection between his bisexuality and his personal politics. It is noteworthy for its role in reclaiming the word "queer". Originally published as "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist", Goodman revised the essay, which was retitled and published posthumously.
In "The Politics of Being Queer", Goodman credits his bisexuality as undergirding his anarchism, pacifism, and utopianism. He contends that promiscuity breaks social class boundaries [1] and that rigidly exclusive attraction, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is pathological. [2]
He described his relationships with young boys as being neither exploitative or pathological, despite public opinion, and that same-sex sexuality was a healthy prelude to friendship and student–mentor relationships. [2]
The essay was first published in the pacifist magazine WIN on November 15, 1969, as "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist". It was reprinted in The Homosexual Dialectic (1972) and The Gay Liberation Book (1973). [3] Goodman revised the essay, which was found among his papers after his 1972 death. [4] The revised edition first appeared in the journal Unmuzzled Ox (1977) and then in Nature Heals , a 1977 collection of Goodman's psychological essays. [3] [1]
The essay is credited as a precursor for reclaiming the word "queer", which had been used as a derogatory term for nontraditional gender behavior for the preceding part of the 20th century. [2] [5] His assertion that queerness was not pathological also encouraged activists to reclaim the word. The rest of his ideas were not as readily adopted by the burgeoning 1960s gay liberation movement. [2] Journalist and civil libertarian Judith Levine described the essay as one of Goodman's most personal and beautiful. [6] Novelist Kerry Howley wrote that the essay was even more subversive 40 years later, with Goodman's praise of anonymous sex and assertion that teacher–student relationships are inherently erotic. [7]
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including nation states, and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. As a historically left-wing movement, this reading of anarchism is placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement.
Queer is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender. Originally meaning 'strange' or 'peculiar', queer came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the late 1980s, queer activists, such as the members of Queer Nation, began to reclaim the word as a deliberately provocative and politically radical alternative to the more assimilationist branches of the LGBT community.
A pink triangle has been a symbol for the LGBT community, initially intended as a badge of shame, but later reclaimed as a positive symbol of self-identity. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, it began as one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, distinguishing those imprisoned because they had been identified by authorities as gay men. In the 1970s, it was revived as a symbol of protest against homophobia, and has since been adopted by the larger LGBT community as a popular symbol of LGBT pride and the LGBT movements and queer liberation movements.
Queer theory is the perspective that questions the perception that cisgender and heterosexual identities are in any sense “standard.” It revisits such fields as literary analysis, philosophy, and politics with a “queer” approach.
"New Queer Cinema" is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s.
Queeruption is an annual international queercore festival and gathering started in 1998 where alternative/radical/disenfranchised queers can exchange information, network, organize, inspire and get inspired, self-represent, and challenge mainstream society with do-it-yourself (DIY) ideas and ethics. Shows featuring queer punk bands, performance artists, and other entertainment are put on at night, while workshops and demonstrations take place during the daytime. Queeruption generally takes place in a different city in a different country every year. It has contributed to anarcho-queer movements. The groups that organize each event and even within the same city may have disagreements about how aspects should represent politics including queer safe spaces.
Queer theology is a theological method that has developed out of the philosophical approach of queer theory, built upon scholars such as Marcella Althaus-Reid, Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler. Queer theology begins with the assumption that gender variance and queer desire have always been present in human history, including faith traditions and their sacred texts such as the Jewish Scriptures and the Bible. It was at one time separated into two separate theologies; gay theology and lesbian theology. Later, the two would merge and expand to become the more inclusive term of queer theology.
Bisexual erasure, also called bisexual invisibility, is the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or re-explain evidence of bisexuality in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources.
Christian denominations have a variety of beliefs about sexual orientation, including beliefs about same-sex sexual practices and asexuality. Denominations differ in the way they treat lesbian, bisexual, and gay people; variously, such people may be barred from membership, accepted as laity, or ordained as clergy, depending on the denomination. As asexuality is relatively new to public discourse, few Christian denominations discuss it. Asexuality may be considered the lack of a sexual orientation, or one of the four variations thereof, alongside heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and pansexuality.
Queer anarchism, or anarcha-queer, is an anarchist school of thought that advocates anarchism and social revolution as a means of queer liberation and abolition of hierarchies such as homophobia, lesbophobia, transmisogyny, biphobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and the gender binary. People who campaigned for LGBT rights both outside and inside the anarchist and LGBT movements include John Henry Mackay, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Adolf Brand and Daniel Guérin. Individualist anarchist Adolf Brand published Der Eigene from 1896 to 1932 in Berlin, the first sustained journal dedicated to gay issues.
Daniel Guérin was a French libertarian-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism, capitalism, imperialism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War. His revolutionary defense of free love and homosexuality influenced the development of queer anarchism.
Racism is a concern for many in the Western lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities, with members of racial, ethnic, and national minorities reporting having faced discrimination from other LGBT people.
The Empire City is a 1959 epic novel by Paul Goodman.
Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life is a 1947 book on community and city planning by Percival and Paul Goodman. Presented as an illustrated primer on how city planning affects socioeconomic order and citizens' empowerment to better their communities, the book reviews historical and modern approaches to urban planning before proposing three of the Goodmans' own provocative community paradigms.
The May Pamphlet is a collection of six anarchist essays written and published by Paul Goodman in 1945. Goodman discusses the problems of living in a society that represses individual instinct through coercion. He suggests that individuals resist such conditions by reclaiming their natural instincts and initiative, and by "drawing the line", an ideological delineation beyond which an individual should refuse to conform or cooperate with social convention. While themes from The May Pamphlet—decentralization, peace, social psychology, youth liberation—would recur throughout his works, Goodman's later social criticism focused on practical applications rather than theoretical concerns.
This is a list of works by Paul Goodman (1911–1972), including his nonfiction, novels, short stories, poetry, and plays.
Anarchism and libertarianism, as broad political ideologies with manifold historical and contemporary meanings, have contested definitions. Their adherents have a pluralistic and overlapping tradition that makes precise definition of the political ideology difficult or impossible, compounded by a lack of common features, differing priorities of subgroups, lack of academic acceptance, and contentious historical usage.
The history of bisexuality concerns the history of the bisexual sexual orientation. Ancient and medieval history of bisexuality, when the term did not exist as such, consists of anecdotes of sexual behaviour and relationships between people of the same and different sexes. A modern definition of bisexuality began to take shape in the mid-19th century within three interconnected domains of knowledge: biology, psychology and sexuality. In modern Western culture, the term bisexual was first defined in a binary approach as a person with romantic or sexual attraction to both men and women. The term bisexual is defined later in the 20th century as a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to both males and females, or as a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to people regardless of sex or gender identity, which is sometimes termed pansexuality.
Parents' Day is a 1951 novel by Paul Goodman. Written as autobiographical fiction based on the author's experiences teaching at the upstate New York progressive boarding school Manumit during the 1943–1944 year, the book's narrator grapples with his homosexuality and explores a series of sexual attractions and relationships that culminates in his being fired by the school. Goodman wrote the novel as part of a Reichian self-analysis begun in 1946 to better understand his own life. He struggled to find a publisher and ultimately self-published through a friend's small press. Reviewers remarked on unease in Goodman's sexual revelations, lack of self-awareness, and lack of coherence in the text. Parents' Day sold poorly and has been largely forgotten, save for some recognition as an early gay American novel.
Paul Goodman was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.
The first modern reclamation of the word 'queer' came in 1969, when countercultural writer Paul Goodman penned his well-known essay 'The Politics of Being Queer'.