Political Memoirs and Intimate Confessions: Analysing Four US Gay Liberation/Gay Rights Militants’ Memoirs
Abstract
The US gay liberation and gay rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s are a contested historical and sociological terrain. We analyse the narrative reconstruction of militant identities in the memoirs of four gay movement militants – Martin Duberman, Amy Hoffman, Karla Jay, Arnie Kantrowitz. The article focuses on the way authors account for the interplay between their self-discovery through sexuality and through militancy. We endeavour to fully appreciate the interaction of the personal and the social in order to gauge the degree to which confessions about sexuality take on a meaning that escapes authors’ control, or whether that meaning is a reflection of the authors’ agency. After a brief summary of how the authors tell about their sexual history, the article analyses the four authors’ distinctly different genders, generations, and political options as pertinent variables for comparison among the memoirs.