Has the Gay Movement Failed?

By Martin Duberman

The past fifty years have seen significant shifts in attitudes toward LGBTQ people and wider acceptance of them in the United States and the West.  Yet the extent of this progress, argues Martin Duberman, has been more broad and conservative than deep and transformative.  One of the most renowned historians of the American left and the LGBTQ movement, as well as a pioneering social-justice activist, Duberman reviews the half century since Stonewall with an immediacy and rigour that informs and energizes.  He revisits the early gay movement and its progressive vision for society and puts the left on notice as failing time and again to embrace the queer potential for social transformation.  Acknowledging the elimination of some of the most discriminatory policies that plagued earlier generations, he takes note of the cost—the sidelining of radical goals on the way to achieving more normative inclusion.  Illuminating the fault lines both within and beyond the movements of the past and today, this critical book is also hopeful: Duberman urges us to learn from this history to fight for a truly inclusive and expansive society.