Imagining a Gay New World: Communities, Identities, and the Ethics of Difference in Late Twentieth-Century America

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Palmer, David
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History

Abstract

The formation of identity-based communities constitutes one of the most important political trends in late twentieth-century America. It has enabled oppressed people to mobilize politically in effort to demand legal protection, acquire political rights, and achieve social legitimacy. Yet, identity claims have also emerged as critical strategies to either uphold or challenge dominant social conventions and imagine new possibilities for citizenship and everyday living, a feature commonly overlooked in scholarship on social movements and identity politics. This dissertation draws from newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and non-academic journals directed at lesbian and gay readers published from the late 1960s through the first half of the 1990s to show how writers grappled with basic human questions of oppression and liberation by asking what it meant to be a sexual minority in American society. In raising these questions, writers reflected on the moral implications of being different

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