lgbt history writing

Fortieth anniversary of Compton’s Cafeteria riot, June 22, 2006. Photo by Philipe Lonestar.

Reprinted by permission of the photographer and the San Francisco Bay Area Independent

Media Center

InterventIons

Transgender History, Homonormativity,

and Disciplinarity

Susan Stryker

The current attention to homonormativity has tended to focus on gay and lesbian social, political, and cultural formations and their relationship to a neoliberal politics of multicultural diversity that meshes with the assimilative strategies of transnational capital. Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (2003), which describes a “new homonormativity that does not challenge heterosexist institutions and values, but rather upholds, sustains, and seeks inclusion within them,” is generally acknowledged as the text through which this term has come into wider currency.1 There is, however, an older formula- tion of homonormativity that nevertheless merits retention, one closer in meaning to the “homo-normative” social codes described in 1998 by Judith Halberstam in Female Masculinity, in accordance with which expressions of masculinity in women are as readily disparaged within gender-normative gay and lesbian contexts as within heteronormative ones.2 It is this earlier sense of homonormativity that is most perti- nent to the thoughts I offer here on homonormativity and transgender history, both as an object of scholarly inquiry and as a professional disciplinary practice.

Terminological History Homonormativity, as I first heard and used the term in the early 1990s, was an attempt to articulate the double sense of marginalization and displacement experi- enced within transgender political and cultural activism. Like other queer militants,

Radical History Review Issue 100 (Winter 2008) doi 10.1215/01636545-2007-026 © 2008 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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transgender activists sought to make common cause with any groups — including nontransgender gays, lesbians, and bisexuals — who contested heterosexist privilege. However, we also needed to name the ways that homosexuality, as a sexual orienta- tion category based on constructions of gender it shared with the dominant culture, sometimes had more in common with the straight world than it did with us.3

The grassroots conversations in which I participated in San Francisco in the first half of the 1990s used the term homonormative when discussing the relation- ship of transgender to queer, and queer to gay and lesbian. Transgender itself was a term then undergoing a significant shift in meaning. Robert Hill, who has been researching the history of heterosexual male cross-dressing communities, found instances in community-based publications of words like transgenderal, transgen- derist, and transgenderism dating back to the late 1960s.4 The logic of those terms, used to describe individuals who lived in one social gender but had a bodily sex conventionally associated with the other, aimed for a conceptual middle ground between transvestism (merely changing one’s clothing) and transsexualism (chang- ing one’s sex). By the early 1990s, primarily through the influence of Leslie Fein- berg’s 1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, transgender was beginning to refer to something else — an imagined political alli- ance of all possible forms of gender antinormativity. It was in this latter sense that transgender became articulated with queer.5

This “new transgender” marked both a political and generational distinction between older transvestite/transsexual/drag terminologies and an emerging gender politics that was explicitly and self-consciously queer. It began for me in 1992, when the San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation distributed one of its trademark Day- Glo crack-and-peel stickers that read “Trans Power/Bi Power/Queer Nation.” The transsexual activist Anne Ogborn encountered someone on the street wearing one of those stickers, but with the words “Trans Power” torn off. When Ogborn asked if there was any significance to the omission, she was told that the wearer did not consider trans people to be part of the queer movement.6 Ogborn attended the next Queer Nation general meeting to protest transphobia within the group, whereupon she was invited, in high Queer Nation style, to organize a transgender caucus.7 As a result, Transgender Nation, of which I was a founding member, came into being as the first explicitly queer transgender social change group in the United States. The group survived the soon-to-be-defunct Queer Nation and became, in its own brief existence from 1992 to 1994, a touchstone in the transgender inclusion debates then raging in San Francisco’s emerging Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

In a contradictory environment simultaneously welcoming and hostile, trans- gender activists staked their own claims to queer politics. We argued that sexual orientation was not the only significant way to differ from heteronormativity — that homo, hetero, and bi in fact all depended on similar understandings of “man” and

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“woman,” which trans problematized. People with trans identities could describe themselves as men and women, too — or resist binary categorization altogether — but in doing either they queered the dominant relationship of sexed body and gendered subject. We drew a distinction between “orientation queers” and “gender queers.” Tellingly, gender queer, necessary for naming the minoritized/marginalized position of difference within queer cultural formations more generally, has stuck around as a useful term; orientation queer, naming queer’s unstated norm, has seemed redun- dant in most contexts and has not survived to the same extent.

When San Francisco gays and lesbians who were active in queer politics in the first half of the 1990s were antagonistic to transgender concerns, we accused them of being antiheteronormative in a homonormative fashion. The term was an intuitive, almost self-evident, back-formation from the ubiquitous heteronomative, suitable for use where homosexual community norms marginalized other kinds of sex/gender/sexuality difference. Although I do not recall specific instances where the term homonormative was used, or who used it, the general discussions in which the term would have been deployed were playing themselves out in any number of places in which transgender inclusion was being contested: within Queer Nation and ACT-UP and AIDS agencies; at community meetings to organize for the March on Washington in 1993 and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1994; at town-hall meetings about gays in the military and domestic partner- ships during the hopeful early days of the first Clinton administration; during policy discussions about including gender identity in the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act; in catfights over who could attend the Michigan Women’s Music Festival; at meetings of the Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas Democratic Clubs; at Pride Parade meetings; at membership meetings and board meetings of practically every lesbian and gay nonprofit organization in the city; at the San Fran- cisco Humans Rights Commission committee on lesbian and gay issues; in flame wars in the letters-to-the-editors columns of the Bay Times and the BAR (Bay Area Reporter); and in coffee shops, bars, dance clubs, dungeon spaces, and bedrooms throughout the city.

The homonormative accusation tended to be leveled against a handful of favorite targets: gays and lesbians who saw transgender issues as entirely distinct from their own and who resisted any sort of transgender participation in queer politics and culture; lesbians who excluded male-to-female transgender people but nervously engaged with female-to-male people, on the grounds that the for- mer were really men and the latter were really women; and, putting a somewhat finer point on the matter, those who conceptualized “T” as an identity category analogous to “GLB” and who advocated for a GLBT community on that basis. In the first instance, homonormativity was a threat to a broadly conceived politics of alliance and affinity, regardless of identity; it aimed at securing privilege for gender- normative gays and lesbians based on adherence to dominant cultural constructions

of gender, and it diminished the scope of potential resistance to oppression. In the second instance, homonormativity took the shape of lesbian subcultural norms that perversely grounded themselves in reactionary notions of biological determinism as the only legitimate basis of gender identity and paradoxically resisted feminist argu- ments that “woman” and “lesbian” were political rather than ontological categories. The third instance requires a more subtle and expansive explication.

In this case, homonormativity lies in misconstruing trans as either a gender or a sexual orientation. Misconstrued as a distinct gender, trans people are simply considered another kind or type of human than either men or women, which leads to such homonormative attempts at “transgender inclusion” as questionnaires and survey instruments within GLBT contexts that offer respondents opportunities for self-identification structured along the lines of

__ Man

__ Woman

__ Transgender (check one)

Misconstrued as a sexual orientation category, trans appears as a desire, akin to kink and fetish desire, for cross-dressing or (more extremely) genital modification. The “T” in this version of the LGBT community becomes a group of people who are attracted to one another on the basis of enjoying certain sexual practices — in the same way that gay men are attracted to gay men, and lesbians are attracted to lesbians, on the basis of a shared desire for particular sexual practices. “T” is thus homonormatively constructed as a properly distinct group of people with a different orientation than gays, lesbians, and bisexuals (or, for that matter, straights). In this model of GLBT intracommunity relations, each identity is happily attracted to its own kind and leaves the other groups to their own devices except in ceremonial cir- cumstances (like pride parades and other public celebrations of diversity), or when- ever political expediency calls for coalitional action of some sort.

In either homonormative deformation, “T” becomes a separate category to be appended, through a liberal politics of minority assimilation, to gay, lesbian, and bisexual community formations. Trans thus conceived of does not trouble the basis of the other categories — indeed, it becomes a containment mechanism for “gender trouble” of various sorts that works in tandem with assimilative gender-normative tendencies within the sexual identities.8 Transgender activism and theory, on the other hand, tend to treat trans as a modality rather than a category. Trans segments the sexual orientations and gender identities in much the same manner as race and class — in other words, a transsexual woman (someone with a transsexual mode of embodiment who lives in the social category woman) can be a lesbian (someone who lives in the social category woman and is sexually oriented toward women), just

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as a black man could be gay, or a bisexual person could be poor. In doing so, trans- gender theory and activism call attention to the operations of normativity within and between gender/sexual identity categories, raise questions about the structura- tion of power along axes other than the homo/hetero and man/woman binaries, and identify productive points of attachment for linking sexual orientation and gender identity activism to other social justice struggles.

A decade before homonormative became a critically chic term elsewhere, I thus suggest, transgender praxis and critique required an articulation of the con- cept of homonormativity. The border wars that transgender activists fought within queer communities of the 1990s had important consequences for shaping contem- porary transgender politics and theorizing, and for charting a future path toward radical activism. Transgender relations to gay and lesbian community formations necessarily became strategic — sometimes oppositional, sometimes aligned, some- times fighting rearguard actions for inclusion, sometimes branching out in entirely different and unrelated directions. Central issues for transgender activism — such as gender-appropriate state-issued identification documents that allow trans people to work, cross borders, and access social services without exposing themselves to potential discrimination — suggest useful forms of alliance politics, in this instance with migrant workers and diasporic communities, that are not organized around sexual identity. One operation of homonormativity exposed by transgender activ- ism is that homo is not always the most relevant norm against which trans needs to define itself.

Antihomonormative Transgender History As important as queer identitarian disputes have been for present and future trans- gender politics, they have been equally important for reinterpreting the queer past. I first started researching the transgender history of San Francisco, particularly in relation to the city’s gay and lesbian community, while participating in the Bay Area’s broader queer culture during the early 1990s. In 1991, during my final year as a PhD student in U.S. history at the University of California at Berkeley, the same year I began transitioning from male to female, I became deeply involved with an organization then known as the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of North- ern California. That organization, now the GLBT Historical Society, houses the preeminent collection of primary source materials on San Francisco Bay Area gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities, and one of the best collections of sexuality-related materials anywhere in the world. I started there as a volunteer in the archives, joined the board of directors in 1992, and later became the first execu- tive director of the organization, from 1999 to 2003.

Through my long and intimate association with the GLBT Historical Society, as well as through two years of postdoctoral funding from the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, I had ample opportu-

nity to exhaustively research the status of transgender issues within gay and lesbian organizations and communities in post – World War II San Francisco. I was able to scan all the periodical literature, community newspapers, collections of personal papers, organizational records, ephemera, and visual materials — tens of thousands of items — for transgender-related content. This research was motivated by several competing agendas. It was first and foremost a critically queer project, one informed by theory, guided by practice, and framed by my historical training at Berkeley in the decade between Michel Foucault’s death and Judith Butler’s arrival; I wanted to account for the precipitation of new categories of personal and collective iden- tity from the matrix of possible configurations of sex, gender, identity, and desire; trace their genealogies and modes of discourse; and analyze the cultural politics of their interactions with each other and society at large. It was also a project to recover the history of transgender experience specifically, in a way that resisted essentializing transgender identities, and to make that knowledge available as con- tent for transgender-related social justice work. Only those who are “crushed by a present concern,” and who want to “throw off their burden at any cost,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” have “a need for a critical . . . historiography.”9 And finally, I was motivated by polemical and par- tisan considerations; I wanted to offer an empirically grounded account of trans- gender history that recontextualized its relation to gay and lesbian normativity and countered the pathologizing, moralizing, condescending, dismissive, and generally wrongheaded treatment of transgender issues so often found in gay and lesbian dis- courses of that time.

Over the course of my research, gender-policing practices came into focus as an important mechanism for shaping the landscape of sexual identity commu- nity formations described in the major historiographical accounts.10 As homosex- ual communities in mid-twentieth century San Francisco redefined themselves as political minorities, they distanced themselves from older notions of “inversion” that collapsed gender transposition and homosexual desire into one another; they simultaneously drew their boundaries at least partly in relation to new and rapidly evolving scientific discourses on transgender phenomena and related medico-legal techniques for changing sex. Homophile groups such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were not initially antagonistic to transgender issues; they sometimes fielded queries from people questioning their gender or seeking a com- munity in which to express a transgender identity, but they tended to redirect such queries elsewhere.11 Transgender issues tended to be seen within the homophile movement as parallel rather than intersecting, at least partially due to the central role that gender normativity played in the homophile movement’s public politics of respectability in the 1950s and early 1960s. In lesbian contexts this took the form of class-based criticisms of butch-femme roles, while in the gay male world it expressed

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itself through the condemnation of the hypermasculine styles found in the leather, motorcycle, and cowboy subcultures, as well as in the femininity of “swish” styles and public female impersonation. Drag remained an important subcultural idiom, especially for gay men and working-class lesbians, but one typically confined to clubs, bars, and private parties; street drag was almost universally condemned and largely relegated to territories coextensive with prostitution, hustling, and other economi- cally marginalized activities. Thus, from the outset of the post – World War II gay rights movement, transgender practices and identities marked communal boundar- ies between the normative and the transgressive.

One particular archival discovery seemed so perfectly attuned to all my research motivations, however, and so seemingly significant yet almost entirely unknown, that I initially questioned whether it could possibly be true. In the cen- terfold of the program for the first Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, held in 1972, I found a description of a 1966 riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, in which drag queens and gay hustlers banded together at a popular late-night hangout called Gene Compton’s Cafeteria to fight back against police harassment and social oppres- sion. The key text reads as follows:

In the streets of the Tenderloin, at Turk and Taylor on a hot August night in 1966, Gays rose up angry at the constant police harassment of the drag- queens by the police. It had to be the first ever recorded violence by Gays against police anywhere. For on that evening when the SFPD paddy wagon drove up to make their “usual” sweeps of the streets, Gays this time did not go willingly. It began when the police came into a cafeteria, still located there at Turk and Taylor, Compton’s, to do their usual job of hassling the drag-queens and hair-fairies and hustlers setting at the table. This was with the permission of management, of course. But when the police grabbed the arm of one of the transvestites, he threw his cup of coffee in the cop’s face, and with that, cups, saucers, and trays began flying around the place, and all directed at the police. They retreated outside until reinforcements arrived, and the Compton’s management ordered the place closed, and with that, the Gays began breaking out every window in the place, and as they ran outside to escape the breaking glass, the police tried to grab them and throw them into the paddy wagon, but they found this no easy task for Gays began hitting them “below the belt” and drag-queens smashing them in the face with their extremely heavy purses. A police car had every window broken, a newspaper shack outside the cafeteria was burned to the ground, and general havoc was raised that night in the Tenderloin. The next night drag-queens, hair-fairies, conservative Gays, and hustlers joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow drags back in again. It ended with the newly installed plate glass windows once more being smashed. The Police Community Relations Unit began mediating the conflict, which was never fully resolved, which ended in a group called VANGUARD

being formed of the street peoples and a lesbian group of street people being formed called the STREET ORPHANS, both of which later became the old GAY LIBERATION FRONT in San Francisco, and is today called the GAY ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE.12

The story seemed important in several respects. First, what reportedly happened at Compton’s Cafeteria bore obvious similarities to the famous Stonewall uprising in New York in 1969, where the militant phase of gay liberation is commonly supposed to have begun, but reputedly preceded it by three years. How the San Francisco gay activist community positioned the Compton’s story vis-à-vis Stonewall in their first commemorative Gay Pride Parade was clearly intended as an early revisionist account of gay liberation history. Furthermore, the inciting incident of the riot was described as an act of antitransgender discrimination, rather than an act of discrimi- nation against sexual orientation. At the time I came across this source in 1995, the role of drag queens in the Stonewall riots had become a site of conflict between transgender and normative gay/lesbian histories — transgender activists pointed to the act of mythologizing Stonewall as the “birth” of gay liberation as a homonorma- tive co-optation of gender queer resistance, while homonormative gay and lesbian commentators tended to downplay the significance of antidrag oppression at Stone- wall — and whatever I could learn about the Compton’s incident would certainly inform that debate. The 1972 document also related a genealogy of gay liberation activism at odds with the normative accounts — one rooted in the socioeconomics of the multiethnic Tenderloin sex-work ghetto rather than in campus-based activism oriented toward countercultural white youth of middle-class origin. For all these reasons, the Compton’s Cafeteria riot became a central focus of my research into San Francisco’s transgender history and its intersectional relationship to the history of gay and lesbian communities.

Although the 1972 document proved factually inaccurate in several particu- lars (the picketing happened before the riot, for example), I was ultimately able to verify its basic account of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, and to situate that event in a history of transgender community formation and politicization that both com- plemented and contested homonormative gay and lesbian history. Most important, I was able to connect the location and timing of the riot to social, political, geo- graphical, and historical circumstances in San Francisco in ways that the Stonewall story had never connected gay liberation discourse to similar circumstances in New York — thereby opening up new ways to think about the relationship between iden- tity politics and broader material conditions. The 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria took place at the intersection of several broad social issues that continue to be of concern today, such as discriminatory policing practices in minority communities, the lack of minority access to appropriate health care, elitist urban land-use policies, the unsettling domestic consequences of foreign wars, and civil rights campaigns

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that aim to expand individual liberties and social tolerance on matters of sexuality and gender. A fuller treatment of this material exceeds the space limitations of this essay, but it can be found elsewhere in works cited below.

Homonormative Disciplinarity Although the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot provides a productive point of critique and revision for homonormative accounts of the recent history of sexual identity communities and movements, most knowledge of this event has circulated through works of public history (most notably the 2005 public television documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria), work by nonacademic writers, and in community-based publications, rather than through professional academic channels.13 In those few instances in which this history has been examined in peer- reviewed journals, the articles have been placed, as this one has been, in sections of the journals set aside for uses other than feature articles. In the one instance where this has not been the case, the article was written by another (nontransgendered) scholar who interviewed me and made use of primary source documents I directed her to, in order to relate the Compton’s Cafeteria riot to her own research interest in the sociology of historical memory.14 I point this out not as a complaint — it was my own decision to pursue the public history dissemination of my research findings; I actually guest-edited a journal issue that put my own research into the back matter and anonymized my authorship, and I have eagerly collaborated with other scholars who have never failed to accurately and appropriately cite the use of my research in their own projects. My aim, rather, is to call needed attention to the micropoliti- cal practices through which the radical implications of transgender knowledges can become marginalized. Even in contexts such as this special homonormativities issue of Radical History Review, which explicitly called for transgender scholarship that could generate “new analytical frameworks for talking about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history that expand and challenge current models of identity and community formation as well as models of political and cultural resistance,” transgender knowledges are far too easily subjugated to what Michel Foucault once called “the hierarchies of erudition.”15

In my original abstract for this issue, I proposed not only to recount the little-known history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot but also to call attention to the multiple normativizing frames of reference that kept the Compton’s story “hidden in plain sight” for so long — the confluence of class, race, and gender considerations, as well as the homonormative gaze that did not construct transgender subjects, actions, embodiments, or intentions as the objects of its desire. I wanted, too, to make meth- odologically explicit the critical role of embodied difference in the practice of archi- val research. As a range of new scholarship on the recent so-called archival turn in the humanities begins to make evident, embodiment — that contingent accomplish- ment through which the histories of our identities become invested in our corporeal

space — not only animates the research query but modulates access to the archive, in both its physical and its intellectual arrangement. Discussing how my transsexual embodiment figured into reading a gay and lesbian archive against the grain served the larger purpose of calling critical attention to homonormative constructions of knowledge embedded in the content and organization of the archive itself. My goal was to offer a radical critique not just of historiography but of the political epistemol- ogy of historical knowledge production.

Because the tone of what I proposed was deemed “personal,” however, due to how I situated my own research activities as part of the narrative, and because, I suspect, I tend to work outside the academy, I was invited to contribute an essay to either the “Reflections” or “Public History” section of Radical History Review, rather than a feature article. I felt some reservations in doing so because my intent had been to do something else. “Reflections” are not as intellectually rigorous as the documented arguments expected in feature articles, and “Public History,” as distin- guished from what academic historians do, can come off as a form of popularization in which knowledge produced by specialists is transmitted to the consuming masses through less intellectually accomplished intermediaries. The journal’s own division of knowledge into “less formal” and “more formal” categories, and the positioning of my work within this two-tiered economy, would replicate the very hierarchies I had set out to critique by containing what I had to say within a structurally less legitimated space.

The most basic act of normativizing disciplinarity at work here is not directly related to the increasingly comfortable fit between gender-normative homosexuality and neoliberal policy. It is rooted in a more fundamental and culturally pervasive disavowal of intrinsically diverse modes of bodily being as the lived ground of all knowing and of all knowledge production. In an epistemological regime structured by the subject-object split, the bodily situatedness of knowing becomes divorced from the status of formally legitimated objective knowledge; experiential knowl- edge of the material effects of one’s own antinormative bodily difference on the production and reception of what one knows consequently becomes delegitimated as merely subjective. This in turn circumscribes the radical potential of that knowl- edge to critique other knowledge produced from other bodily locations, equally par- tial and contingent, which have been vested with the prerogatives of a normativity variously figured as white, masculinist, heterosexist, or Eurocentric — as feminism, communities of color, and third world voices have long maintained, and as the dis- abled, intersexed, and transgendered increasingly contend.

The peculiar excitement of academic humanities work at this moment in time lies, in my estimation, in the potential of interdisciplinary critical work to produce new strategies through which disruptive knowledges can dislodge the privileges of normativity. Breaking “personal voice” away from the taint of “mere” subjective reflection, and recuperating embodied knowing as a formally legitimated basis of

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knowledge production, is one such disruptive strategy. Deploying disciplinary dis- tinctions that foreclose this possibility is not. But that is precisely why the oppor- tunity provided by the editors of this volume for my words to occupy these pages under the heading of an “Intervention” was ultimately such a welcome one. In the end, it has enabled the critique I intended to offer all along, albeit not in the form or manner I initially proposed, while opening up the space to push the argument one turn further.

Homonormativity, I conclude, is more than an accommodation to neoliberal- ism in its macropolitical manifestations. It is also an operation at the micropolitical level, one that aligns gay interests with dominant constructions of knowledge and power that disqualify the very modes of knowing threatening to disrupt the smooth functioning of normative space and that displace modes of embodiment calling into question the basis of authority from which normative voices speak. Because transgen- der phenomena unsettle the categories on which the normative sexualities depend, their articulation can offer compelling opportunities for contesting the expansion of neoliberalism’s purview through homonormative strategies of minority assimilation. And yet, even well-intentioned antihomonormative critical practices that take aim at neoliberalism can fall short of their goal when they fail to adequately account for the destabilizing, cross-cutting differences within sexual categories that transgender issues represent. Such critical practices can function in unintentionally homonorma- tive ways that circumvent and circumscribe, rather than amplify, the radical poten- tial of transgender phenomena to profoundly disturb the normative — even in so seemingly small a thing as where an article gets placed in a journal. Creating a proper space for radical transgender scholarship, in the double sense of scholarship on transgender issues and of work by transgender scholars, should be a vital part of any radically antinormative intellectual and political agenda.

Notes 1. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on

Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 50. 2. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 9. 3. I posted an earlier version of these observations on the genealogy of homonormative on

[email protected], November 7, 2006. 4. Robert Hill, personal communication, October 6, 2005; see also Robert Hill, A Social

History of Heterosexual Transvestism in Cold War America (PhD diss., University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 2007).

5. I have made this argument elsewhere; see Susan Stryker, “The Transgender Issue: An Introduction,” GLQ 4 (1998): 149 – 53; Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ 10 (2004): 212 – 15; and Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4 – 8. On Feinberg’s use of “transgender,” see Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (New York: World View Forum, 1992); reprinted in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies

Reader, 205 – 20. On page 206, Feinberg, after listing a variety of what s/he terms “gender outlaws,” that is, “transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and drag kings, cross-dressers, bull-daggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes,” notes that “we didn’t choose these words” and that “they don’t fit all of us.” Because “it’s hard to fight an oppression without a name connoting pride,” s/he proposes “transgender” to name “a diverse group of people who define ourselves in many different ways.” While acknowledging that this term itself may prove inadequate or short-lived, s/he intends for it to be “a tool to battle bigotry and brutality” and hopes that “it can connect us, that it can capture what is similar about the oppressions that we endure.”

6. Ann Ogborn, interview by the author, July 5, 1998, Oakland, California. 7. Gerard Koskovich, an early member of Queer Nation – San Francisco, recalls “lively

critiques regarding the group’s awareness and inclusiveness regarding transgender and bisexual issues.” He writes: “I recall a telling incident at one of the earliest QN meetings that I attended: A lesbian in her early 30s made comments to the general meeting to the effect that she didn’t appreciate gay men wearing drag, an act that she portrayed as an expression of misogyny — in short, she offered an old-school lesbian-feminist reading. This led to a group discussion of the uses of drag as a critique of gender norms — a discussion that ultimately changed the woman’s mind. That early anti-drag moment quickly gave way to Queer National celebrating personal styles that transgressed gender norms in various ways — a phenomenon that fit well with the in-your-face politics of representation that drove many QN actions.” Personal communication, December 8, 2006.

8. David Valentine, “I Went to Bed with My Own Kind Once: The Erasure of Desire in the Name of Identity,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 123 – 38; David Valentine, “The Categories Themselves,” GLQ 10 (2003): 215 – 20.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” 1874, trans. Ian C. Johnson, www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/history.htm (accessed May 12, 2007).

10. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940 – 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging Gay Identity: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950 – 1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Marcia Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).

11. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 176 – 85.

12. Raymond Broshears, “History of Christopher Street West — SF,” Gay Pride: The Official Voice of the Christopher Street West Parade ’72 Committee of San Francisco, California, June 25, 1972, 8.

13. Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, dir. Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker (Independent Television Service/KQED-TV, 2005); Susan Stryker, “The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot of 1966: The Radical Roots of the Contemporary Transgender Movement,” Critical Moment, no. 12 (2005): 5, 19. Susan Stryker, “ ‘The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You!” Transgender Tapestry, no. 105 (2004): 46 – 47; Mack Friedman, Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture (Los Angeles: Alyson, 2003) 129 – 33; David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 109 – 10.

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14. Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, “MTF Transgender Activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin: Commentary and Interview with Elliot Blackstone,” GLQ 4 (1998): 349 – 72; Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage, “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 724 – 51; see also Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 229.

15. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975 – 1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 7 – 8.