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Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in Sa-? Francisco, 1950-1994. By ELIZABKTH A. ARMSTRONG. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xix + 272. $60.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
In Forging Gay Identities, Elizabeth Armstrong narrates and conceptualizes the shift from homophile organizing to gay liberation to a gay identity-based movement during the second half of the twentieth century. Using primary and secondary sources, Armstrong addresses her work to sociologists interested in social movements and social change. Her analysis of San Francisco's gay movement serves to revise existing theories of organizational sociology, political process/resource mobilization theory, and new social movement theory. Although mostly derived from existing historical research and interpretations, the book offers an analytical perspective that is distinctive.
From the vantage point of the turn of the twenty-first century, Armstrong demonstrates how the gay movement came to focus on identity and valorize individual expression. As displayed since the 1970s in the ubiquitous gay pride parades, the process of "coming out" has brought together a heterogeneous population to celebrate various identities and lifestyles, more recently including bisexual and transgender along with gay and lesbian. Whereas ideological, gender, race, and class differences have fragmented other recent social movements, the success story of organizers' unification of the gay movement around gay identity and visibility is the central focus of this book.
Armstrong self-consciously departs from the sociological tradition of evaluating movement outcomes in terms of formal political gains and institutionalization; rather, she examines the informal realm of identity and culture while tracing the growth of the gay movement in San Francisco. After laying out her theoretical premises in chapter 1, the author proceeds chronologically to demonstrate the often overlapping transitions from a homophile ("interest group") logic in the 1950s and 1960s to a short-lived revolutionary ("redistributive") logic in the late 1960s and early 1970s to a visibility ("identity") logic from the 1970s to the 1990s. She illustrates her model with original quantitative data compiled from resource guides and directories, using several charts and graphs to display her information on organizational growth and decline; on the whole, however, this is a qualitative study that draws from movement periodicals and scholarly research.
Historians will not find much new empirical information, and even the differences in argument arc often slight. John D'Emilio's...