Oppression & Liberation

Michael Magnusson chats with leading British gay historian Jeffrey Weeks, who was in Melbourne recently to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of a seminal gay text: Denis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation.

“To be a homosexual in our society is to be constantly aware that one bears a stigma,” wrote Australian author Dennis Altman in the opening of his 1972 book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation.

To honour the fortieth anniversary of this landmark publication, one of the first to explore the origins and impact of the gay liberation movement, a conference was held in Melbourne last week: ‘After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation’.

Organised by La Trobe University together with the Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives, conference speakers came from around the country – and the world.

A keynote speaker was Professor Jeffrey Weeks from London’s Southbank University, who has charted the rise of the gay liberation movement in his native Britain.

Author of Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britian from the Nineteenth Century to the Present and, more recently, The Languages of Sexuality, Weeks tells MCV the messages in Altman’s books are still relevant.

“I compare Altman with another writer, Christopher Isherwood, who Altman knew,” Weeks says.

“They are two different sorts of writers with a different stance to being public. Dennis is famous for being gay and a gay writer. So was Isherwood, but they were both different. The fundamental difference is that Isherwood was speaking for himself but Dennis was speaking for a movement, and was able to speak because a new movement existed.”

Weeks says Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation is essentially about identity.

“We are talking a new lesbian and gay identity which eventually became the GLBTIQ identities and it was crucial at the time to express and develop the idea of a positive gay identity,” he says.

He says the book shows how identity links into the idea of a community, which again allows its members to speak out in a way they could not before – and this formed the basis for political action.

After 40 years, Weeks says, there are now many identities and even those who reject the idea of identities.

“Some queer theory and activism denies sexual identities – although, paradoxically, it does it by affirming another identity,” he says. “Although identities are difficult and never fully describe who or what we are, they seem still to be pretty essential.”

Weeks says the idea of “community” has changed dramatically. “What we have is a vast, global network of GLBTIQ people, which, because of community, are able to speak out about and defend their sexuality.”

In some countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America, Weeks says GLBTIQ people still have to struggle for the very idea of identity, so that although some ideas in Altman’s book “may seem a little dated in some ways, when you think about it in the way in which the world has developed and the way the GLBTI has developed those ideas are still pretty crucial in many parts of the world.”

Weeks says when he visited China some time ago where there was an emerging gay presence in Beijing and Shanghai. “There were some obviously gay men sitting around listening to disco music. But it was hardly a scene at all. I’ve been there recently, but I gather there is now a flourishing gay scene in the larger cities.”

Weeks thinks this is in part due to wider social, political and economic changes: “When you think of burgeoning economies in countries like Brazil, modernization of the economy, social relations and economic growth does change sexual mores as well.”

He says another development in the last 20 years has been the development of a global language for discussing GLBTIQ issues.

“The very idea of human sexual rights didn’t exist 40 years ago and it’s really only developed since the late 1980s. Every country, even the most totalitarian, nominally pays honour to the idea of human rights, but not necessarily human sexual rights. But there is a language which people can argue through now, which is a developing universal language, and that is a very important shift.”

Weeks says his and Altman’s generation in the early 1970s had to defend and argue for their gayness; today, even the most reactionary regime has to defend why it does not affirm human sexual rights.

“It puts the homophobes on the defensive,” he says. “Anglican archbishops or Roman Catholic bishops and archbishops or plain homophobes are quite happy to deny homosexuality or recognition of homosexuality – but they have to defend themselves in a way that 40 years ago they didn’t.”

Regarding the push for changes to Australian law to allow same-sex marriage, Weeks says it will happen eventually, if his own country’s experience is anything to go by.

“Fifty years ago, Britain was still regarded as a puritanical, narrow-minded country with one of the harshest regimes on homosexuality in the so-called developed world,” he explains.

“Today, it has one of the most liberal sexual regimes. Even the Prime Minister, David Cameron, is talking about going on to the next step from civil partnerships to same-sex marriage.

"This is a man who ten years ago voted against all progressive legislation for lesbian and gay rights. Now he is bowing to the new climate.”