queer history and Doctor Who

[kindkit]

A lot of people in Who fandom--me included--have said that Canton's expressed wish to marry his male partner was anachronistic for 1969 in the US. But as lilacsigil pointed out to me, some other folks have shown it wasn't. I don't know who first posted about this in relation to the episodes, so I'll just summarize what I found on Wikipedia once I knew enough to look.

In 1970, Jack Baker and his partner James Michael McConnell applied for a marriage license in Hennepin County, Minnesota. They were denied it and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.

They didn't give up. In 1971 they obtained a marriage license in another Minnesota county and were married by a Methodist minister. They're still together, by the way. They even filed their taxes as a married couple until 2004, when the IRS started rejecting their forms after the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act.

And in 1972, thanks to the activism of Baker and others, the Democratic Party in Minnesota made equal marriage rights part of its party platform. This didn't last, but it was a hell of an important first.

So, Canton's hopes weren't as anachronistic as all that.

The way so many of us assumed that they had to be makes me wonder why we're so invested in seeing queer history as a narrative of complete and irresistible oppression (with the brief exception of Stonewall) until about the 1990s. Obviously I'm not denying that there was and still is oppresion, but why are we so quick to forget the resistance? I know a little about the Mattachine Society and other pre-Stonewall activism, but I don't know nearly enough, and shockingly little about the actual post-Stonewall movement. Clearly there was a lot more going on in the seventies than the "giant sex party" image that one picks up from TV and movies.

Comments

[skywaterblue]

I'm willing to bet it's because most of the people who would tell us about the history of gay activism in the 70s are dead.

Remember, at this point in time, most lesbians identified as a part of the feminist movement first and had very little interaction with male homosexuals. It took AIDS to bring GLBQT together.

[eumelia]

Remember, at this point in time, most lesbians identified as a part of the feminist movement first and had very little interaction with male homosexuals. It took AIDS to bring GLBQT together.

That isn't necessarily so. I recommend Sister/Brother: Lesbians & Gay men write about their lives together. It's a little dated (it's from 1995), but the stories span about 5 decades.

[lilacsigil]

I think part of the "complete oppression" narrative is that we want to have a corresponding narrative of continual improvement from a clearly identifiable zero point, Stonewall. But I can't remember where I first saw the info either!

[kindkit]

That makes sense--people do tend to gravitate towards linear stories, and progress is always an appealing narrative. But just what I learned from my bit of googling makes it depressingly clear that there hasn't always been straightforward progress. I can't imagine a major political party (even just a state version) in the US making equal marriage rights part of its platform now, because Christian conservatism has become so influential in the last forty years.

[eumelia]

*waves*
lilacsigil posted a link to you in my post about Doctor Who where I make the same assumption regarding Canton Delaware. Thanks for that!

There's actually a lot of Gay Liberation History lying around, but marriage wasn't actually on the agenda most of the time. That became part of the post-AIDS discourse.

[kindkit]

Hi!

There's actually a lot of Gay Liberation History lying around

I don't doubt it. I'm just a bit shocked at myself for not having explored it more, and for how unquestioningly I accepted an oversimplified narrative. I should know better to assume that, for example, because marriage wasn't on the mainstream gay rights agenda until fairly recently, it was "unthinkable" and never on any queer person's agenda.