A scrupulous review of what socialist and working-class movements have usually demanded — universal health care, free education, public housing, democratic control of the means of production — doesn’t easily square with how identity politics are typically understood. In its strictest sense, identity politics describes how marginalized people embrace previously stigmatized identities, create communities on the basis of shared attributes and interests (which are typically held to be essential and unchanging), and rally either for autonomy or for rights and recognitions. I would take this argument a step further and say that even the new left social movements that gave birth to the term identity politics have not always fit this mold. [...]
Carl Wittman’s influential broadside, “A Gay Manifesto,” published in 1970 by the Red Butterfly brigade of the Gay Liberation Front, gives us useful insight into the early militants’ thinking. Far from celebrating the gay ghetto, Wittman treats San Francisco as a “refugee camp.” Rejecting gay marriage as a political goal, he calls instead for alternatives to matrimony. And while stressing the political necessity of coming out, Wittman underscores the tentativeness of identity with glances at a liberated, bisexual future: “We’ll be gay until everyone has forgotten that it’s an issue.” Likewise, Dennis Altman’s 1971 polemic, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, concludes with a chapter titled “The End of the Homosexual.”
Under the rubric of liberation, activists embraced identity in order to abolish it. Marxist ideas about class struggle — which similarly culminate with the abolition of social classes — influenced their ideas. They rallied around demands for adequate income, housing, medical care, ecological well-being, and meaningful employment. Their liberation struggle was ultimately a revolutionary call to action with a universalist view of freedom. [...]
All of the new left social movements trace similar trajectories. Over the course of the 1970s, the women’s movement, the black movement, and the gay movement all retreated from their original, radical outlooks to take on essentially liberal worldviews. As political imaginaries contracted, each began to dwell more comfortably in the house of identity. This process dovetailed with post-Fordism’s and neoliberalism’s new forms of lifestyle consumerism. Periodic upsurges in radicalism occasionally interrupted this trend, but these outbreaks were quieted, domesticated, and reabsorbed back into the main movement.
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